Monday, July 28, 2008

The Sheriff Is a Ni—!

Believe it or not, we are currently living through the plot of Blazing Saddles on a national scale. Perhaps admit it or not would be the more accurate phrase.

Just like the movie's fictional Western town of Rock Ridge, the country is beset by a beastly gang of misfortunes--soaring gas prices, stumbling economy, resurgent inflation, global warming, and two or three unendable wars.

Just as in the movie, a dashing, eloquent, smart, handsome, decent, and charming hero has appeared on the horizon to save the day.

And just as in the movie, the hero is black. The extended joke, in the movie and in this year's election, is in watching the white people of Rock Ridge and the country try to come to terms with this strange turn of events.

As funny as anything is seeing how few people can even bring themselves to acknowledge what might be happening. There are any number of articles about the puzzling fact that while the Republicans are almost universally blamed for the fix the country's in, and while the Republican candidate is an overaged, underinformed, flip-flopper with a wooden speaking style and a platform that promises to stick doggedly to the policies that got us in this fix, the election remains tantalizingly close.

Pundits scratch their heads over Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, wondering whether it's his "newness," his "inexperience," his "strangeness," or his "inaccessibility" that is holding him back.

Just as people tip-toe gingerly around the N-word, so they avoid considering the most likely explanation for what's happening, that Obama's background, the story he proudly tells us "could only happen in America," is itself generating the old All-American racist reaction that we have seen in action repeatedly over the years.

It's like we've got the inarticulate Gabby Hayes-figure from the movie perched on the tower with the spyglass on the new sheriff coming over the horizon, repeatedly trying to yell down the news that "the sheriff is a ni—" but repeatedly having the end of the word garbled by the noise of the crowd. It's as if the word of the new sheriff's identity hasn't gotten through to us.

In Rock Ridge, the word eventually does get through and the townspeople's negative reaction is immediate, overt, and unambiguous. In America today, there's no way to tell for sure what's going on. 

The infamous older, rural, white males might still be ready to acknowledge their racial hostility. But even among old white men "he's not one of us" is about as clear as anyone feels they can get without being called a racist. Any reporter looking for people honest enough to acknowledge that they don't like Obama's skin color is going to come up with slim pickings. 

We've got plausible deniability on this issue. There are plenty of other reasons people can give for opposing this candidate. Obama is new. He is inexperienced. He is, for all his eloquence, somewhat inaccessible. But he's also black. And that's what makes his success to date the miracle that it is.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Hunter Fan

Will Bolton is an aeronautical engineer in Livermore, California. He wrote and sent this post last week.

Under normal summer conditions, when the high temperature during the day gets up to about 95 F or so in Livermore, we usually don't need to turn on the airconditioner. The key is opening up the house in the evening when the outside temperature usually gets down to the low 60s or the high 50s. In the evenings, we open up the house and turn on a fan that I set on the floor in front of the back deck screen door. This story is really about the fan. I brought it back from my folk's house in Denver when I was getting ready to sell the house after my parents passed away. The fan is a 12" oscillating desk made by the Hunter Fan and Ventilator Company, Fulton, New York, founded in 1886. My first solid memory of this fan was in about 1949 when my folks and I were living in a rented trailer in Raytown, Missouri, between World War II and Korea. 

In recent weeks, the fan has been making a rattling noise when it was on high speed. This afternoon, I had some time so I decided to try to figure out what was causing the noise. I guessed that a motor bushing was wearing causing the fan shaft to wobble. I got out my tools and started taking things apart. The first amazing thing I found was that it was possible to take it apart. It was assembled using threaded fasteners into metal parts, not heat welded plastic parts designed with the "disassemble by destroying" philosophy. The fan is surprisingly heavy and that is because it is made of substantial materials. The whole fan is made of metal. The only plastic I could find were some small electrical insulators and the rotary on/off speed selection switch handle.

As I got deeper into the fan, I was amazed by what I was finding. The motor is an old-school laminated  silicon steel frame style. The fan runs in bronze bushings lubricated by a oil wick system fed from a reservoir and refilled by an external fitting. The oscillating system is operated by a small transmission with nicely made steel worm gears and a clever mechanism to lock the fan in a single position or to allow it to oscillate. The transmission is in a die cast aluminum case packed with grease and with packing seals on the various shafts entering the case. The rotary motion of the transmission is converted into oscillating motion of the fan by a lever that attaches to a rotating wheel by a screw. The screw has a polished shoulder that a bronze bushing the in the lever rides in and the screw even has a left hand thread so it won't loosen by the rotation of the wheel. This fan is literally made to last forever with reasonable maintenance. In fact, I couldn't find any reason for the rattling noise I was hearing.

A little superficial research showed that the Hunter company suspended making consumer products during World War II. In 1946, they moved from Fulton, New York, to Memphis, Tennessee, where they are still located. The data plate on the fan shows that the fan was made in Fulton, suggesting that - since my folks were married in 1944 - it was probably made in 1946 - making it at least 62 years old as I write this. As I was working on the fan, two questions occurred to me: 

Is it possible to buy a fan this well made today - at any price? 

Why did the Hunter company make a fan this good 62 years ago? 

While I was pondering these questions, I started cleaning up parts, removing the 60 year old grease from the transmission and repacking it with new grease, refilling the oil reservoir, and getting out my can of Meguire's paste car wax to polish the beautiful metal fan blades. That was when I discovered that the set screw in the fan hub, that fits into a flat ground into the motor shaft, was loose. So after being plugged in, turned on, and ignored for 62 years the only thing wrong with the fan was a loose set screw - which took about 5 seconds to tighten. 

We bought a new washing machine last weekend. Our first washing machine was a Kenmore that my folks bought new, used for about 15 years, and gave to my wife Joan and I when I was in graduate school. We used it for about another 15 years before we had to replace it - 30 years of service. The next machine was another Kenmore and it lasted for a total of about 15 years. When we went to the store last weekend to look at washing machines, the salesman told us that they last about six to eight years now. Our experience is that each generation of washing machine costs more and lasts half as long. Some sort of inverse Moore's Law value proposition. 

So, I don't know the answer to my first question. However, my answer for the second question is that the Hunter Fan and Ventilator Company made a high quality fan 62 years ago because it was going to be good for my soul today.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Butler & Bailey

If time travel is your idea of interesting, Butler & Bailey in Knoxville is the grocery store for you. Located in the Rocky Hill Center on Northshore Drive, Butler & Bailey is in the middle of a transformation affecting the whole northern shore of the Tennessee River, as pricey subdivisions fill up real estate to the west of the city.

Things are changing in Rocky Hill. Right across the street, a new housing development is taking shape on the hill above the old Baptist church. All the shops in the strip mall sport spiffy new facades.

But inside Butler & Bailey it's still 1955. Mr. Bailey, a florid-faced fellow reminiscent of Mayberry's Floyd the barber (but without the moustache), presides at the manager's station. Where other stores often barricade the manager in a cubicle behind an eight-foot wall, Mr. Bailey stands in tie and grocer's apron behind a low desk to the left of the cash registers, chats with his cashiers, and greets customers as they come through the door.

There's a big, slightly beat-up kangaroo kiddee ride at the front of the store and the plate glass windows are plastered with lost pet notices and ads giving away litters of beagle puppies (the neighborhood seems to recycle its animals). Butler & Bailey is clean but natural. There is no "look" that's been applied to the interior and it's apparent from the store's slightly musty smell of rotisserie chicken that no "fresh grocery scent" has been piped in either. This store has not been packaged. Haphazard charm is the only brand identity it's selling.

(If Butler & Bailey ever opens franchises, they could match the physical feel of the place, but they'd also have to hire a Mr. Bailey to front every store, and that may not be possible. You could clone this place like Burger King, but invariably there would be genetic anomalies—the other Mr. Baileys would lapse intermittently into Yiddish, or come to work in pantyhose.)

Parking spaces for the store's patrons are marked in the lot outside, but half of the signs spell Butler "Bulter." There's a Purity ice cream freezer sitting in the corner of the frozen foods section, in front of what looks like a closet door. In the bread department, pastries are spread out on a display table that's so big it almost blocks the aisle. The store's selection is fine but not overwhelmingly varied. Like the décor it's casually catch-as-catch-can.

Merita products dominate the bread section, for example, but you can also find specialty items that might not be available elsewhere, like a display of Orangina soft drinks in the produce section, as well as Claey's Old Fashioned Horehound Candies, homemade cherry divinity from Georgia, Driver's Chess and Chocolate Chess Pies from Lebanon, Tennessee. Prices are reasonable to low.

The cashiers are all school kids working what looks like their first jobs. There are no automated check-out machines in Butler & Bailey. If you shop here you'll have to talk to humans. You can use a charge or debit card, but the kids at the registers have to run it through an authorizing contraption wired to the register.

In Butler & Bailey, it's hard to feel like you're riding at the forefront of contemporary culture. But come on, you're in a grocery store. It's not a fashion show or a club. Back in the good old days, not only were there public environments that didn't look like the set of a music video, there weren't even music videos.

Talk to them, John Lennon--imagine no music videos! Nothing to change your hair for, and no deodorant, too. In the days when people bought food for their evening meals the same day every day, grocery stores were mundane, "unspecial" environments, the one place where you could almost get away with shopping in your pajamas. Now, when even public toilets are given a special look, people wear their pajamas to the mall, to church, to their weddings. I think there's a reason for that. I think people want a break from branding. They want to relax.

In Butler & Bailey, the shoppers are suburban housewives with children, retirees, husbands dropping in from the hardware store next door. It's largely a Caucasian crowd but a comfortable crowd. Everybody seems to know everybody. People stop and chat. If you just stepped off a plane from New York, you will go nuts in Butler & Bailey; if you just spent four hours in a sensory deprivation tank, you'll do just fine.


Monday, July 21, 2008

Herding Cats

Jean-Paul Sartre said hell is other people. He should have got himself a cat. Contrary to what you might conclude from watching a lot of classic cartoons, the real choice in life is not between cats and dogs. The cool cat drops the anvil on the head of the slobbering, stupid dog, the dog kicks the cat the length of a city block; it's good sadistic fun, but really all a shadow play, a tiresome stalking horse of a confrontation that enables us to avoid facing the real issues of life. Like the weather, cats vs. dogs is what people talk about when they're not ready to get down to brass tacks.
 
It's not whether you prefer cats to dogs, it's whether you prefer cats to people. Dogs are only faux people, after all, not man's best friend but man's best clone. Just another animal running in a pack, they get along by going along. The whole basis of our relationship with them is their instinctive willingness to follow us down the street. They can and will switch from their pack to ours automatically; all we have to do is give them a whistle.
 
Is it fair to demand a higher standard of individual integrity than that from a pet? Maybe not. But how about from the pet owner? I'm not bothered that dogs resemble people, but that people resemble dogs. And the tendency to follow the pack is not the main problem with people anyway. Sociability is not a crime. If you're looking for some connection, any connection, there's something to be said for a species that's easy.
 
No, the bigger problem shared by people and dogs is that any relationship with them is so labor intensive. There's no crisp give and take here. Dealing with both species is like playing tag with tar babies. You leave the dog at home alone and he shreds the curtains, you forget the human's birthday and he refuses to speak to you. Too often there's a quid pro quo with these creatures. No matter how hard they wag their tails when they see you, no matter how much they extol unconditional love, there is invariably a burden of neediness and manipulation that you take on from the moment you bring them home from the pound.
 
The dog wags its tail, not really because it likes you but because it needs to be liked, and that, too often, is the way it is with people. They pick the wrong partners because they need to be liked, they try manipulate their partners into loving them, and it all goes for nothing. I know being liked is one of the basic human needs. But when you impose yourself intimately on another human, you can't do it to be liked. Better to do it for sex or money or boredom than to be liked.
 
People should be together because they enjoy each others' company. Realizing the other person likes you is part of that enjoyment, of course, but it's best if that realization is more the unexpected reward of the affair, the delightful surprise payoff, rather than your whole reason for being there.
 
If you can't get step back far enough from a relationship to tell why you're in it, you need to cultivate detachment. Learn to see yourself as others see you. Get a guru, start meditating. Be aware of what you're doing while you're doing it. Aspire to be as self-contained and independent as the cat. You may get there in this life, or you may have to wait for your next incarnation to achieve this higher plane, but it is possible.
 
Think of the way of the cat as a spiritual discipline, a difficult path that offers potentially large personal rewards. More people prefer dogs than cats, polls show, and I think it's because dogs represent the easy way out. They are a comfort to us. We're reassured by them because they're not a smidgeon any better than we are. They resemble us in every embarrassing detail.
 
Dogs resemble people, and cats resemble the universe. In their fundamental indifference they challenge us to set aside our neediness and take a stance as independent as their own. They ask us to engage them from a position of strength as emotional equals. They demand that we grow up.
 
A lot of people fail to rise to the challenge. It's no surprise that many cat lovers become much more infantile around their pets than dog lovers do. The cat in its removed superiority is subconsciously so intimidating that its owners are reduced to baby talk and obsequious catering to the animal's every perceived whim. The cat itself remains indifferent, accepting the kowtowing as no more than its due.
 
I'm not saying cats are incapable of affection or that it's all take and no give with them. Cats aren't totally indifferent, but their motives are so pure that people that people are taken aback by their simplicity and directness. I don't think, for example, that when cats lick the hand that pets them they're just asking for more petting. I think they are genuinely feeling and expressing affection. They just don't care deeply about what you make of the gesture. What the cat wants it wants, what it feels it feels, and there are no extraneous strings attached.
 
If the cat wants to be on the table and you don't want it there, saying "no" won't keep it off the table, and taking it off the table repeatedly won't keep it from trying to get back up there. By the same token, the cat isn't going to sulk about being thrown off the table or even, apparently, give it a second thought. Scold a dog and it will cringe guiltily; scold a cat and it will stare at you blankly.
 
This is an emotionally straightforward creature, an animal that doesn't play games. Like the weather, this animal may smile on you one day and absolutely refuse to do what you want the next, and none of it is personal. Cat owners come to terms with this. They learn to ride the ups and downs of their animal's whims like surfers riding a wave. They learn not to fight the flow of daily interactions, they learn to compromise, just as the wise man learns not to fight the caprices of the universe.
 
So this is a model for human relationships? Just go with the impersonal flow? Well, if the surf gets too rough you get out of the ocean. But yes, I say this beats trying to change the break of the wave. You use the surfboard to ride the wave, that's what it's there for. You can always manipulate your surfboard. But you can't manipulate the surf, or make people like you, or rebuild love by rebuilding your lover, any more than you can herd cats.

Friday, July 18, 2008

The Next Elvis

Politics is the art of pushing people around for their own good. You promote public support to back your policies and put them in place. This involves manipulating people to get what you want. It does not generally attract people with low self esteem. 

This explains why truly great politicians are few and far between. It is very difficult to reconcile awareness of and empathy for other people's problems with a drive to be the big boss of everything.

Right now people are discovering that Barack Obama is a politician, not just a motivational speaker, and it's throwing them for a loop. Liberal supporters are dismayed as Obama announces positions--support for security surveillance, backing for faith-based charities--that appeal to conservatives.

Presidential candidates in a general election classically move to the center to appeal to the broadest range of voters and that always alienates their supporters on the fringes of political opinion. These moves may clash with candidates' previously stated positions or violate their own personal convictions of right and wrong. 

Acting in emergencies, even the greatest presidents have violated basic human rights. Lincoln suspended habeus corpus in the Civil War. Roosevelt interred Japanese Americans in World War II.

In seeking and exercising power, politicians throw their weight around, and sometimes they knock people over. Elections are about deciding which candidates we feel would make the most constructive use of their ability to manipulate or even hurt people, and abuse it the least. 

Anyone running for president of the United States has got to be an egomaniac. We need to pick the egomaniac with greatest dedication to the public good.

I think Barack Obama is a once in a lifetime presidential candidate, both because of who he is and what he makes of it. The first African American nominated as a major party candidate, Obama manages his identity in a way that demonstrates wisdom, great maturity, and the greatest dedication to the common interests of all Americans.

In the 1950s, pioneer rock 'n' roll producer Sam Phillips famously proclaimed, "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a million dollars."

He found Elvis Presley, with a resulting cultural payoff that was far more important than the millions Elvis made. As controversial and divisive as rock 'n' roll lifestyles and racial revolution have proven to be, I think they have advanced ideals of freedom and national community in ways that have made this country a much better place than it was in 1956.

Now Obama is crossing the same lines between the races that Elvis crossed, in the even bigger arena of national politics. How he, and the country, handle this larger exploration of race, identity, and community could have profound consequences for the well being of the American soul. For better or worse, Obama could be bigger than Elvis.

Political manipulation of race has in the past been one of the curses of American politics. At the start of his national career, and periodically on the campaign trail still, Obama himself has used his racial identity in a fairly dishonest way. 

Invoking the mixed heritage of his Kenyan father and his Kansan mother in his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic national convention, Obama proclaimed, "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."

This "only in America" stuff is manipulative, pandering hooey. In America, even in the 21st century, Obama's story is a miracle. There are people in Tennessee, my neck of the woods, who would rather see Obama dead than elected president.

Elsewhere, as in his book Dreams From My Father and in his remarkable speech on race during the controversy over the outspoken black pastor of his Chicago church, Obama has presented a more harrowing, straightforward, and constructive account of the struggles he went through to come to terms with his mixed heritage. When he speaks in these ways, Obama promotes racial understanding and healing in ways that only someone with his story could do.

When he speaks in these ways, I find it easy to forgive the ways in which he is a political animal.

If Obama is elected, black people will still be overrepresented in prison and white people will still be overrepresented in positions of power and white people will still be uncomfortable in all-black settings and black kids will still struggle to find an identity and build a future and America will still have miles to go to become a colorblind society.

If he makes it, Obama may prove incapable of delivering on all the promises, stated and unstated that his candidacy represents. If the country makes him president, it may prove incapable of living with what it has done.

This could all go horribly wrong. But right now, it is going different.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Back to the Snootville Kroger

I review grocery stores for Metro Pulse, the alternative paper in Knoxville, Tennessee. Writing reviews of grocery stores is like reviewing people's living rooms. There is something intimate about buying food. It's not like going to a movie or going out to eat. People do that two or three times a month maybe, and there's no big emotional investment on their part; they might develop loyalties to a particular restaurant or movie star or director, or even like the popcorn sold at a particular theater.

But they go to the grocery store every day or every other day, almost as often as they make an evening meal, and that store becomes more than just a place they visit for fun sometimes. It becomes part of their neighborhood, the place they are from, part of their history and identity.

I'm just figuring some of this stuff out. I am a relative newcomer to the esoteric world of literary supermarket criticism. I'm learning fast, though. A couple of reviews ago, I suggested that the people of South Knoxville deserved a little more fun and pizzazz in their lives that I thought their Kroger was providing.

The result was a full-page letter in the next issue of the paper from an insulted South Knoxvillian, who reported being fully catered to and entertained by the neighborhood Kroger, thank you very much, and implied that I could take my opinions back to whatever condescending Snootville I happened to have crawled out of.

While claiming to hate grocery shopping and to patronize the South Knoxville only because it is close to home, the writer did take the time to go there before sending the letter and count the more than 40 kinds of deli meat and poultry available, just as in the Krogers in other neighborhoods. As for the South Knoxville hollows that I described as looking as inaccessible as the upper reaches of the Amazon, the writer explained they were inaccessible because South Knoxvillians treasure their privacy, presumably against the inroads of wiseasses like me.

Having never been on the receiving end of a well-written put-down, I found my self considering the boundaries of neighborhood and personal identity. I didn't grow up in South Knoxville; I'm not even a native Tennessean. Was I unqualified, as this writer strongly implied, to discuss the doings of South Knoxvillians? How qualified, for that matter, was she to talk about this stuff?

While people tend to regard their living rooms, houses, and neighborhoods as their own, they aren't really. I imagine most people possess equity in that part of their living room sitting under the couch, with the rest owned by a bank or mortgage company.

And, of course, the South Knoxville Kroger isn't the aggrieved letter writer's Kroger, my Kroger, or South Knoxville's Kroger. It's owned by a big corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio.

A while back, the South Knoxville Kroger had some very nice trees planted in front of it. One month every single tree was cut down and gas pumps were installed in their place. I live in South Knoxville and shop at the Kroger, and I liked the trees. I don't even object that much to the gas pumps. But nobody from Cincinnati asked me beforehand if it was OK with me if they chopped down the trees.

South Knoxville doesn't even belong to South Knoxvillians. If some out-of-town businessmen decide to level one of our hollows and throw up some ugly apartment complex, as they did recently in my neighborhood, that's the way it goes. I imagine the Cherokee also enjoyed the privacy afforded by our hollows until Andrew Jackson decided they would better enjoy the privacy provided on the plains of Oklahoma.

The hold we have on our homes, our families, our neighborhoods, our lives is tenuous. That's the way life is. It's pretty scary. That is why, as the letter writer pointed out, people take pride in five generations of ownership of a South Knoxville home. That is why we cling to the familiar as if it were part of us. That's why we defend our grocery stores against the snide remarks of others.

That's why I'd better watch my step. I'm the outsider who walks the aisles where every shopper is a stranger, where no neighborhood is my own. I can't let down my guard--I'm in groceries.