Reading List 2017

Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River, David Owen (171231) ***+ This book offers the same clear-eyed view of complexity as Owen offered in his excellent Green Metropolis. One important and inescapable conclusion is that fantasy is a big part of the so-called water rights debate: "paper water" is what's specified by historic usage agreements; "wet water" is what actually flows in the river. There's a lot more of the former than there is of the latter.

Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and The Twelve Steps, Richard Rohr (171206) *** A step-by-step exegesis of the 12 Steps, with insightful commentary. I need to listen to (or read) this again in order to capture more of its riches. Theology comes on a bit thick in places. 

Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans,  John Marzluff and Tony Angell (171128) **** Really worthwhile and full of amazing anecdotes. There are diagrams and illustrations that accompany the Kindle version. Well read.

The Riders, Tim Winton (171115) **** Beautiful writing and story-telling. Scully and his daughter Billie are sharply drawn, and Winton, an Australian, renders the supporting cast of characters with a great eye for detail. More of this writer ahead as well.

Caught, by Henry Green (171114) **** My first Henry Green novel. At times I felt that he was writing in or creating a new language. The book deserves a closer reading than I gave it, nibbling bits each night from my Kindle. I will definitely read more of his work.

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for The Second Half of Life, Richard Rohr (171029) *** A thoughtful book, well-written and very well read by the author. Many useful references to Jung and the Twelve Steps. I want to read this again in paper to digest its lessons of individuation more fully.

Empire of Liberty: A History of the New Republic, 1789 – 1815, Gordon S. Wood (171022) **** Excellent account of a formative period in America’s becoming a nation. Full of interesting insights: America’s drinking problem, the long-simmering conflict between the Federalists and Republicans, campus protests, the indomitable growth of commerce, and more. This book is so good I’ve ordered a paper copy to read again.        

Anasazi America, David E. Stuart (170924) **** A survey of 1700 years of Chaco and Pueblo civilization in the U.S. Southwest. Although I would have liked more detail about daily life and ritual, Stuart stays close to the factual record in his extremely well-written account. His thoughts about sustainable communities run through his book like a red thread. One of the most worthwhile and interesting books I’ve read in a long time.

Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy (170907) ***** This is the third volume in the Border Trilogy. It’s gripping, engrossing, disturbing. The writing is just superb, so full of heart and truth. I’m strongly inclined to start over again with All The Pretty Horses. Evidently, the title is a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. Very well read!

Chokehold: Policing Black Men, Paul Butler (170816) *** A discouraging look at criminal justice for blacks in the U.S. in 2017 by an expert witness. Considering the volatility of the issue, Butler’s book is a remarkably balanced cry for reform.

I Am Radar (print edition), Reif Larsen (170810) N/A Stopped after 250 pages. Imaginative and well-written but I’m only able to get through a few pages each night. I plan to return to it.

Commonwealth, Ann Patchett (170708) ***** Even better than State of Wonder, which was excellent. Patchett uses an interesting narrative technique in this novel that draws on the short story form.

The Hundred Days, Patrick O’Brian (170613) *** A really lovely story, a bit less swashbuckling than others because a lot of the focus this time is on Stephen Maturin and his colleague Dr Amos Jacob as they carry out a complex bit of spying in Algiers.

The New Poilitics of Extremism, Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein (170531) *** Cogent and depressing analysis. I stopped reading a few chapters before the end, not because there was anything wrong with the book but because I felt that reading about “solutions” at this point was an academic exercise at best.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, David Grann (170526) ** Well-written and very well-researched. An absolutely horrible story about the way the US treated and mistreated the Osage Indian Tribe in Oklahoma. Grann worked hard to collect the facts and present the underlying atrocities. In the end, the structure of the book never quite knit together.

The Hour of Land, Terry Tempest Williams (170428) *** Heartfelt, often poetic description of national parks and why they’re so important. A little preachy at times.

Worshipful Company of Fletchers, James Tate (170416) *** Wonderful poetry. I plan to read more of Tate.

The North Water, Ian McGuire (170415) **** Hard-bitten whaling yarn and mystical saga wrapped into one. Extraordinarily well-drawn characters. Beautifully read.

The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean (170401) *** A lively and well-written look into the strange world of orchids and the obsessions they inspire in people. Part John McPhee, part David Foster Wallace.

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead (170319) ****  A powerful work of history and imagination. Extremely well-drawn characters. The plotting floats gracefully and seamlessly in and out of fantasy. There are a few stretches that seemed a bit doctrinaire, but a second reading (which would be worthwhile) may create a different impression. Slavery is harrowing, and Whitehead presents the awful truth with restraint and respect.

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I, Robert Caro (170312) *** Extremely thorough and well-researched. Moves pretty well considering all the weight it carries. Johnson does not come off as a very likeable guy. Not sure I have an appetite for vols 2 and 3.

The Trespasser, Tana French (170105) **** There were moments when I was tempted to put this story aside but I’m glad I stuck with it. Antoinette Crowley, Irish Detective, is an interesting character in a well-plotted tale enlivened by gritty detail.

The Dovetail Saw: A Parable

I took up woodworking in my 40s. I had extravagant visions of the useful and beautiful pieces I was going to make. A whole world was opening before me, and boy, was it exciting. Also expensive. I was especially taken with the simplicity and practicality of Shaker furniture. Simple meant easy, right? Wrong. In order to make anything that resembled even the most basic Shaker pieces, I had to master an advanced skill. I had to learn to cut a dovetail joint. 

Next time you’re near a piece of wooden furniture, slide out a drawer a little and see how the front and side are attached to each other. There’s a good chance you’ll find a dovetail. It’s a very effective way of joining two pieces of wood. If the joint is well-cut, you don't even need glue. The tenon is cut in the shape of a bird’s tail that spreads towards its end. The mortise is a notch cut precisely to receive the tenon. A well-cut dovetail joint is as beautiful as it ingenious. 

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A dovetail joint: the tenon, above, is cut precisely to fit in the mortise, below. The pieces will be firmly wed for a very  long time.

Cutting a dovetail joint is a true test of craftsmanship. In his book The Nature and Art of Workmanship, David Pye defines craftsmanship as work whose quality depends on the judgement, dexterity and care of the maker. The outcome, he argues, is continually at risk during the process of making: one slip might ruin the piece. Bringing risk into the discussion makes a lot of sense, because there’s no way to uncut a dovetail. If your saw wanders off a straight line, or cuts a mortise that's too wide, there's no faking your way back. 

Which brings us to the tool called a dovetail saw (pictured at the top). Because so much depends on cutting the joint flawlessly, you wouldn’t dream of entrusting the task to a cheap piece of steel. As an aside, I confess that one of woodworking’s most seductive charms is the fact that you can buy a tool or a jig or a template or a gadget for absolutely any and every purpose. The corollary of course is that the more you spend on your gizmo, the closer you get to a sure-fire guarantee of success, right? My dovetail saw was French-made. It had a shapely pistol grip handle. A key selling point was that the steel blade had 32 tiny teeth cut into every inch of its overall length. With all those teeth, the sales pitch went, this shark of a saw would chomp through even the orneriest pierce of cabinet grade wood. 

I brought my saw home and went on a dovetail binge. I cut mortises and tenons wherever it made sense (or not). I made drawers and I made boxes and then I made more of each. Poorly. I had already made a Shaker step stool using an indifferent saw because I didn’t actually expect to finish the project. Now that I had a $60 excalibur from a top woodworking store in New York, Garrett Wade (so upstream it was on the second floor), there was no limit to my potential.

One day a piece of mail arrived from Garrett Wade announcing a lecture series. One of the topics: how to cut a better dovetail. Exactly the help I needed! The speaker was Mario Rodriguez, a woodworking instructor and writer well-known to readers of Fine Woodworking magazine, like me. So one night after work, I went over to Garrett Wade, which was then in Soho. I climbed up the stairs. Even before I reached the landing  I was intoxicated by the heady scent of sawdust, shellac, varnish and metal. I sat down in one of the dozen or so folding chairs that had been set up for the lecture. At the front of the room was a workbench.

Rodriguez took the stage, looking friendly and relaxed. He wore corduroy slacks and a turtleneck shirt. 

"If you want to cut better dovetails," he said, "you need a better saw." (I am paraphrasing a bit -- this was a few decades ago.)

Damn, I thought. I just bought a better saw.

“Think about it,” he said. “More teeth means more resistance and that means more work and that means less accuracy. Why do you want to make it so hard?" What followed was a breathtaking demonstration, akin to the magician who puts his lovely assistant in a box and saws her in half. To wit, he secured a fancy dovetail saw upside down in a vise on the workbench and quickly filed off all the teeth. This was counterintuitive, to put it mildly — a little like saying “If you want to upgrade your Corvette, start by smashing in the windshield.” Then, using triangular files of different sizes, he cut new teeth, about 12 to the inch. That didn't take long either. Now he sets the angle of the teeth, bending each one ever so slightly this way and that like alternating dog ears. Finally, he invites us to come up and try the saw on a piece of wood with a straight line drawn down its front. No question: it was easier to push through the wood. It cut dead straight, very fine  very easy.

I was glad not to have to buy another saw. All I had to do now was run the risk of ruining the one I already had. For that, I did have to buy some triangular Japanese files, of course, along with a bunch of other essential items that I never knew I needed until that very evening.

I am not and will not ever be an artisan. But the lesson was priceless — and liberating -- nevertheless. “It’s simple,” Rodriguez said as he sent us off into the night. “If the tool you’ve got can’t do the job, change the tool so that it can.” 

Post-script: After all this, it turned out that my first Shaker step stool, the one I made in the basement with an ordinary saw from Ace Hardware, is still the most useful piece I ever made.

'Tis a poor craftsman who blames his tools, and a clever one who makes them better.

The Political Industrial Complex

October 3 may become an important date in the legal history of the United States. On the second full day of the court’s October 2017 term, the nine justices heard arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a gerrymandering case that the authoritative SCOTUSblog calls “massively important.” SCOTUSblog reported that among the celebrities in the gallery for the proceedingswas Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said on a few occasions “It’s time to say ‘hasta la vista’ to gerrymandering.”

The Court has wrestled with gerrymandering in the past. As recently as two years ago, five justices agreed that the practice was “incompatible with democratic principles.” The complexity of the issue concerns the difficulty of defining a consistent standard to use in determining whether districts have been deliberately drawn up to give one party in an election an unfair  -- and unconstitutional -- advantage over another. 

In a detailed essay published last month, two knowledgeable observers argue that gerrymandering is only part of what’s wrong with the American democratic system. In “Why Competition in The Politics Industry Is Failing America,” Katherine Gehl, a business leader and former CEO, and Michael E. Porter, an expert on competition and strategy, argue that the problem with democracy in America isn’t that the political system isn’t working. On the contrary, they say, it’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

Their conclusions reflect the results of a multi-year effort launched in 2011 by the Harvard Business School “to understand the disappointing performance of the American economy” and what to do about it. Here’s a link to the complete report.

The Political Industrial Complex
Politics has become an industry, Gehl and Porter observe. Competition in this industry is intense, but instead of being about how to deliver better solutions to the nation’s problems, it’s about how “to grow and accumulate resources and influence for itself.” The problem is neither Democratic nor Republican. In fact, it's both. They, the two parties, constitute a deeply entrenched duopoly that controls the rules of competition. As the authors note, no major new political party has appeared since the founding of the Republican Party in 1860. Talk about high barriers to entry.

The industry lens the authors use produces a useful and reasonably non-ideological critique. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Moderates, and others all have a vested interest in a system that’s more focused on preserving its own power than on creating beneficial solutions for voters. What’s especially valuable in this report is its emphasis on four specific and practical ways to revise the system:

• Restructure the election process
• Restructure the governing process
• Reform money in politics
• Open up near-term competition without waiting for structural reform

These are ambitious goals. But the good news is that important initiatives are underway, and Gehl and Porter offer information about them (including links). I’ve provided an abbreviated summary below.

Restructure The Election Process

• Single non-partisan primary with top four vote-getters advancing to general election – incentivizes all candidates to appeal to the general electorate rather than a small cadre of party-partisan voters.

http://www.fairvote.org/top4#why

Nonpartisan primaries would also lower the barriers to entry for independents, moderates and candidates who may not adhere fully to their party’s orthodoxy.

Nonpartisan primaries would also empower office-holders to build records of sensible compromise and getting things done.

As a first step, replace closed primaries with open ones.

• Institute ranked-choice voting with instant runoff in general elections.

This approach elects the candidate with the broadest appeal to the most voters. No votes are ever “wasted.” There can’t be any “spoilers.” Every voter lists her or his top four choices in order. If no candidate receives a majority in the first round, the candidate with the fewest first choices is eliminated and voters who liked that candidate best will have their ballots counted for their second choice, and so on until a candidate wins a majority.

https://ivn.us/2017/06/13/want-expand-voter-rights-support-ranked-choice-voting/

• Institute nonpartisan redistricting:
  gerrymandering reduces competitive seats and thereby minimizes accountability for elected officials. Independent commissions should take over redistricting, as they already have done in Arizona, Idaho, California and Washington.

As mentioned above, in its October 2017 term the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments
in Gill v Whitford, a case brought by Wisconsin voters against that state. The plaintiffs have developed a statistical methodology designed to provide an evaluation based on an objective standard of fairness, which has not existed up to now.

www.campaignlegalcenter.org/document/make-democracy-count-ending-partisan-gerrymandering

• Rewrite debate access rules for presidential elections:

Republicans and Democrats collude through hidden rules to maintain their duopolistic control over the process. No candidate outside the two-party system has a reasonable chance of being able to participate in a debate.

www.changetherule.org

Restructure the Governing Process

• Rewrite legislative rules
  As a first step toward devising a better system, establish an independent Legislative Reform Commission to design a new set of legislating and governing rules and produce a public report of its recommendations.

Reform Money in Politics (see report for a detailed discussion)

www.represent.us

http://www.blueprintsfordemocracy.org/download-pdf-1

Open Up Near-Term Competition without waiting for structural reform

• Implement The Centrist Project’s “Senate Fulcrum Strategy"

A highly leveraged way to break the current political gridlock would be to elect three to five centrist independent U.S. senators with a problem-solving agenda. Ideally, such a group would be large enough to deny either party an outright majority and thereby become the most powerful swing coalition (i.e., the “fulcrum”) in the Senate. This is a feasible approach because the number of seats needed to deny either party a majority is small. Quoting the New York Times columnist David Brooks, the Centrist Project calls its initiative an “insurgency of the rational.”

www.centristproject.org

• Expand the “Govern for California” model of state-level innovation

“Govern for California is an organization focused on state-level reform by leveraging political philanthropy to support the election of candidates to the California state legislature, whom they select based on non-ideological criteria. These include financial literacy and courage to take a stand, the latter defined by Govern for California’s founder, David G. Crane, as ‘the demonstrated willingness to stand for something greater than oneself.’’

So far, Govern for California has helped finance 14 successful legislative candidates.

N.B. “The political industrial complex pays close attention to state legislatures,” say Gehl and Porter, “but most citizens are barely engaged.”

As the 2018 mid-term elections approach, this clear-eyed report would serve admirably as a roadmap for "rational insurgency."

Free Parking

So how was Parking Day? Don't tell me you missed it! Since 2005, this event has taken place annually on the third Friday of September. You didn't know? You had a chance to celebrate by transforming a metered or otherwise eligible spot into something other than a place to stash a vehicle. You could have installed a pop-up health clinic. a bike repair station, a place for a wedding, a ping pong "court", a canoe dock, a cafe where visitors could relax and drink a coffee. Or you could have organized a seminar about parking. Maybe next year, eh?

“I know how to park,” you say. Or “I don’t have car. What’s to talk about?" Actually, quite a lot. 

The $96 billion hassle
Let’s start with the poor, beleaguered U.S. driver. That may be you. On average, he or she spends 17 hours every year looking for 15 square meters in which to leave a vehicle. Considering that most cars are in motion only 5% of the time, that parking space is pretty important. In total, according to research conducted by Inrix, a traffic consultancy (and parking app developer), looking for parking represents a total annual cost to American drivers of $95.7 billion, reflecting

• $72.7 billion of wasted time, fuel, and other operating expenses
• $20.4 billion of payments for more time than the driver needs, and
• $2.6 billion of parking fines.

That doesn’t include the societal cost of traffic congestion, the economic cost of cancelled appointments (reported by 40% of the Inrix US sample) or shopping trips, or the emotional cost of a confrontation with another driver over a parking space (reported by 32% of male US drivers).

So why not build more parking? It turns out that there are already more parking spaces in the U.S. than we might ever need. They’re just not where we need them. According to one estimate, there are between 105 million and 2 billion parking spaces in the United States. As many as one-third of them are in parking lots. The New York Times reported a few years ago that there are 8 spots for every car in the country. Let’s say there are 500 million spaces in the U.S., as MIT Professor Eran Ben-Joseph suggests. That’s an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. In some cities, he says, parking accounts for more than one-third of the total land area.

Parking Math
Barring dramatic changes, more parking is probably on the way. The reason: in many cities, guidelines require builders to provide a minimum amount of parking for each apartment. These requirements are all over the lot (so to speak) — one space per apartment, two spaces per apartment, two spaces per unit with one of them being covered or underground; and so on.

Apartments are not the only buildings affected. Typically, fast food restaurants have to provide one space for every 3 seats. Bowling alleys have to build seven spaces per lane, plus one for every employee. As The Economist discovered, in Las Vegas. "sex novelty shops" are required to provide 3 spaces for every 1,000 sq. ft. of floor space, while "adult entertainment cabarets" must provide 10 for the same area. In Cupertino, California,  home of Apple’s new corporate headquarters, the city required 11,000 spaces for its 14,000 employees. Total space devoted to offices and labs in the new Apple building: 318,000 square meters. Total space required for parking: 325,000 square meters. And you ask why the traffic in Silicon Valley is some of the worst in the nation?

Just a traffic jam or two away from  Apple, Elon Musk is doing his best to reinvent driving.  He's having more success with that than with reinventing parking. At the Tesla factory in Fremont, CA, 6,000 employees are locked in a daily Hunger Games struggle for 4,500 spaces. Some employees told the Wall Street Journal recently that they arrive early to find spaces, then sleep in their cars until it's time to go to work.

Parking Combat at Tesla

On the residential front, one big problem is that a lot of renters don’t own cars. Nevertheless, the rent they pay is based on the builder’s cost of providing parking -- whether they want it or not. Renters who don’t own cars, who tend to be less affuent than those who do, pay in aggregate a whopping $440 million a year for an amenity they don't use, according to the UCLA Economic Letter. Among the other negative consequences,  minimum parking requirements add to the cost of housing. In some cases, the parking upcharge represents as little as 6%; in others, it's as much as 35%, according to the Sightline Institute, which studies sustainability issues in the Northwest U.S. 

Unfortunately, as many as one-third of all the spaces provided to comply with minimum requirements go unused, even at the busiest times of the day. A study by Smart Growth America reported in The Washington Post found that of five transit-oriented development projects in five different cities, not one "generated enough parking to fill even half the number that planning industry standards would have suggested." As Chris Zimmerman of Smart Growth America told The Post, the land closest to stations is most valuable. Putting parking there means there's  less room for affordable housing, offices and retail. 

The Oslo Solution
Meanwhile, drivers circling the block are filling the air with pollution. The average time each U.S. driver spends searching for parking over the course of a year is 17 fun-filled hours. That figure flattens out significant regional variations. In New York, for instance, the average annual circling time is 107 hours. That's a lot of exhaust. Indeed, auto emissions take more American lives each year than traffic accidents -- 53,000 for the former, 34,000 for the latter.

To cut down on Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHGs) , the city of Oslo, Norway, proposed banning vehicles from the city center -- as other cities have tried to do. After all, most of the residents of downtown Oslo — 88% — don’t own cars. Still, the idea went over like a cold sauna, and provoked such vehement opposition that the city had to back up. What they decided to do instead is simpler:  remove all the parking spots. Now they’re in the process of converting them for use as public spaces, playgrounds, sites for cultural events “or other things you can fill the space with when you don’t have 1,200 kilograms of glass and steel,” Oslo’s mayor told Fast Company. 

Rocky Mountain High
By seeking to make more parking available than is needed, much of it free, cities and corporate landlords are providing a powerful incentive for people to keep driving. That’s one reason public transport projects have converted so few drivers. In 1990, The Economist reports, 73% of Americans drove to work alone. In 2014, the percentage went up, to 76%. So deeply ingrained is parking in our cultural DNA that even organizations that you'd expect to support public transport seem blind to the need.

The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), for instance, a leading nonprofit environmental research and consulting firm, built a 4,000 square foot headquarters  in Snowmass, Colorado. This architectural showcase utilized a wide variety of advanced green building techniques and materials. In his book Green Metropolis, David Owen argues that despite its technology, RMI set a terrible example, not only by building “in a fragile location, on virgin land 7,100 feet above sea level,” but also by locating its HQ 180 miles from the nearest transit system. That means long commutes for employees and lots of fuel consumption by delivery trucks, snowplows, and maintenance vehicles, among others. RMI has since converted the building to a private residence for its founder.

Disruption Ahead
Another way to spend Parking Day is by pondering about the future of the automobile. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, projects that by 2050, there will be as many as 1 billion battery electric vehicles (EV) on the road. These will account for 69% of global car sales and for half of all vehicles in operation. In fact, there are already two million EVs driving around (soundlessly) today.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance says that electric cars will become cheaper than conventional autos by or before 2030. India has said that by that year, it wants all cars sold in that country to be electric. Norway plans to make the sale of internal combustion vehicles illegal by 2025. France and the UK plan to do the same by 2040. By 2030, says RethinkX, a think tank, conventional vehicles will still account for 40% of the autos in the U.S., but for only 5% of the miles travelled. Within 10 years of regulatory approval, predicts the think tank, 95% of US passenger miles will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals. The full title of the ReThinkX report deserves a spoiler alert: "The Disruption of Transportation and The Collapse of the Internal Combustion Vehicle and Oil Industries."

If that happens, the parking game is going to change dramatically, freeing up a lot of space, time and money for every American. 

What are the odds? 

Consider: on September 6, the U.S House of Representatives passed legislation to speed up the roll-out of self-driving vehicles. During the same week, China announced it will soon join other countries that have set a date for the end of internal combustion vehicle sales.

And in the Flash Gordon category, a savvy investor group has just put up $90 million to help finance the development of a flying car. The prototype, called the Eagle, is a two-seater. A five-seater "air taxi" is also in development. It has a projected range of 186 miles. It's electric, too. Best of all, perhaps, these airborne chariots take off and land vertically. That at least will make it easier to park -- once the pilot finds a spot.  

Credit: The Owner-Builder Network

Metaphor and Menace

Town Wall, c. 13th century, Rotenburg ob der Tauber, Bavaria, Germany

Hadrian built one. The colony of New Amsterdam built one. Berlin built one. So did Constantinople. And Jerusalem. And possibly Jericho. Throughout history, every settlement that gave a thought to its stature and survival built a wall.  Some were meant to keep people out. Some were designed to keep people in. Some, as Robert Frost noted, said they meant to do one thing even while doing the opposite. But the "beautiful wall" that Donald Trump keeps promising to build along the border between the United States and Mexico can’t be reduced to a simple purpose. Nor can it be reduced to a single part of speech. For Trump, "Wall" is both noun and verb. In both cases, they mean danger.

Tough Sell
As recently as the G20 meeting earlier this month, the President insisted that he was “absolutely” convinced that Mexico would pay for the wall, even though these days more unauthorized non-Mexicans are apprehended at the US Border than actual immigrants from Mexico. With all the other Trumpian material in their baggage train, members of the House and Senate are not exactly clamoring to finance a two thousand mile long billion dollar barrier, even one made of solar panels. 

But why even bother? The walls are already up. According to the Dow Jones site MarketWatch, fewer travelers are coming to the US from international locations, and 6% fewer prospective travelers are seeking information online. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who followed the G20 meeting in Hamburg last week. The President quickly succeeded in becoming the least popular leader at the meeting. He sat alone at the conference table as the 19 other participants engaged in substantive dialogue. Trump has distressed America's allies by pulling out of the Paris climate agreement and has further offended them with his aggressively isolationist “America First” posturing. Without appearing to break a sweat, Donald Trump built a wall around himself. 

The Wrong Kind of Elk
And the walling doesn’t stop there. Consider all of his proposed roll-backs . To name a few, he has taken aim at environmental regulations protecting clean air and water, at measures designed to prevent financial mayhem, at birth control, at nutrition programs for children, at health care for tens of millions of Americans and at seemingly every single thing that Barack Obama ever tried to do. Believe it or not, Rick Perry's Energy Department has ordered up a study of whether wind, solar and other forms of renewable energy pose a threat to coal, oil and natural gas. Maybe a solar wall isn't such a good idea after all, Mr. President. Meanwhile, The  Onion has satirically reported that the Interior Department has requested the resignation of all the elk appointed during the Obama administration, regardless of subspecies (thanks, Jim Warren). 

All of these acts of denial, withdrawal and rejection recall an ancient, archetypal legend. In an essay published in the 1960s, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges reflects on the Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti (pictured) who, after bringing the Six Kingdoms under his rule, began the building of what we know today as The Great Wall of China. But that’s not all he did. He also ordered that all books written before his time be burned. As Borges observes, calling for the immolation of 3,000 years of learning, in a culture that reveres its past, was  a shocking act. Perhaps, Borges suggests, “the wall in space and the fire in time were magic barriers designed to halt death.” In a current idiom, that approach might resonate with a 70-year old man preoccupied with his hair-do. More pragmatically, if we take the tale at face value, it tells the story of a ruler who wanted to establish absolute control over space and time by abolishing the world outside and the world before. It's all connected.

George Orwell, whose classic 1984 is enjoying brisk sales these days, understood this all too well. The slogan of the Party in the novel is:  "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

So be alert! As Sergeant Esterhaus used to say on Hill Street Blues, "Let's be careful out there."

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Photo via Visual Hunt

Trade Secrets

Take a guess: who's called “The Father of the American Industrial Revolution?" If you don’t already know, you might be considering such titans as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Samuel Morse, Eli Whitney. Every one of these is worthy of great acclaim, but none of them holds the title. 

Photo: Igor Ovsyannykov

To begin with, the Father of the American Industrial Revolution was not an American. He came of age in Derbyshire, England, the son of a prosperous farmer. As did so many others at the time, he went to work in 1783 at the age of 14 as an apprentice in a textile mill owned by a man named Jedediah Strutt. This was no ordinary factory. Its machinery was as high as technology got in that day — a water-driven spinning mill designed by Richard Arkwright. This ingenious device could produce in ten minutes as much yarn as a housewife working on her spinning wheel at home would produce in 9 hours. 

Birds of Prey
Arkwright had a few partners, including Strutt. They all zealously guarded the secrets of their machinery, and so they should have. To read contemporary accounts, there was an American hiding behind every tree, hoping to persuade a mill worker to spill  some trade secrets. There was a lot at stake: America imported vast quantities of British yarn and cloth. The amount climbed steadily, from 356,000 yards in 1785 to more than ten times as much by 1800. 

So valuable did England consider its monopoly that it forbade skilled workers, including and especially textile hands, from leaving the country. A pamphlet published in England in the mid-1790s warned “there are plenty of agents hovering like birds of prey on the banks of the Thames,” eager to persuade artisans, mechanics and others to come to America. in the U.S., fully aware of the prohibition against emigration, mill owners ran come-hither ads in English newspapers just the same, hoping to set a hook.

Englishmen were outraged. The great historian Fernand Braudel reports that William Pitt the Elder, who actually supported the Americans in the War of Independence, is supposed to have said: "if America so much as considers making a stocking or a horseshoe nail, she shall feel the full weight of British might.”

Still, it was plain as day that anyone who managed to get to America with the plans for an Arkwright spinning machine was going to make a fortune. You can see where this is going. As it happens, our Father’s Day Guest of Honor had risen to become superintendent of the Strutt mill, in which capacity he often had occasion to take apart the machines and put them back together again. And he had memorized every bobbin, lever, gear and spindle.

The Great Escape
Under cover of darkness (one would imagine) and disguised as a farmer, our man stole his way to London. He was stopped at the dock when he tried to board a ship bound for New York, but his farmer’s get-up was convincing and he hurried on board. 

His name: Samuel Slater. It took him some time to get started after landing in the U.S. in 1789, but once he did, he built factories from Maine to Pennsylvania. He built a town for his workers and machines in Slatersville, Rhode Island, which still stands. Life in a cotton or woolen mill was not a Currier and Ives kind of occupation. Women and children as young as 7 labored from 6 in the morning to 7 in the evening 6 days a week, breathing in lint and dust in surroundings that William Blake called, in another country but at about the same time, “dark Satanic Mills."

The disruptive effects of the Industrial Revolution went far beyond textiles. Some of those included:

"Non-industrial wage labor increased; urban centers grew; and in farming areas, outwork occupations and commercial agriculture transformed the rural labor market. . . these economic developments coincided with dramatic changes in family life, particularly declining family size and increasing life expectancy. A greater role for women in the labor force, contemporary politics, and reform activities was certainly one of the unintended consequences of technological change in nineteenth-century America." [Women and the Early Industrial Revolution in the United States, by Thomas Dublin]

So to earn the lofty title of "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" -- supposedly from that lover of industry, Andrew Jackson, no less -- was therefore no small thing. Nor was the title he earned back home and which sticks to this day: Slater the Traitor. Leaving poetry aside, he could just as easily be called "Slater, another traitor" because larceny played an important role in what polite society might call "the diffusion of knowledge." 

Patriots Among Thieves
None other than Alexander Hamilton condoned the practice of technology piracy. In this, he was joined, at least for a time, by George Washington himself, who praised the "zealous" efforts of a rather questionable fellow named Thomas Digges to help send artisans and machines "of public utility" to the United States. For the sake of earning a respectable place for their young country in the international community, Washington and Hamilton both toned down their cheerleading but they did not go further than that. 

Perhaps the greatest feat of industrial piracy was that of Francis Cabot Lowell's, for whom Lowell, Massachusetts is named. He managed to travel from England to the United States in 1815 with a fairly complete set of plans for a water-powered loom. It took him no time to put the loom and the spinning machines under the same roof and the rest, you might say, is history. 

Well, almost. Arkwright was distraught to have lost control of the industry that was growing all around him. He applied to the British Courts for a patent that would give him exclusive rights over the water-powered spinning machines he felt had invented. The case moved slowly. At length the petition was denied. Reaslon: it appears that years before, Arkwright had originally stolen the idea from someone else. 

As for Slater, his story is much happier. In 1790, a few years before his mill started operating, the United States produced a grand total of two million pounds of cotton. By 1835, its output had increased to 80 million pounds. At the time of his death in that same year, Slater's fortune was estimated at $1.2 million, a colossal sum for the time. His success was not only enough to garner a Presidential nickname, but also to earn him a place on "The Wealthy 100," a ranking of the richest Americans ever from Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates.*

Happy Father's Day!

* The Wealthy 100, by Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther Citadel Press, 1996.

lower case history

So much of history hangs on the wall in the manner of a dusty old canvas with a gold-plated upper case title like THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, THE MING DYNASTY, THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. There’s another kind of history, the lower case kind, that’s humbler, much less stately, though no less informative. 

An example is staring us in the face right now. As our coal-loving President withdraws the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum in Harlan Country, Kentucky, is switching to solar power. Owned by the Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, the museum is making the move to lower its energy bills by installing 80 solar panels on its roof. It expects to save as much as $10,000 a year. The museum’s level-headed albeit ironic decision attracted attention from CNN, The Washington Post, the New York Times and even, via Twitter, Al Gore. It's not clear whether the President is aware of this collision of realities.

The Writing on the Wall
For another striking example of a lower case moment we thank Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, a brilliant book about the impact of digital media on society.  Shirky observes that since social effects lag far behind technological ones, “real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather,” he says, “they go from A through a long period of chaos” before reaching B. 

Case in point: the effect of movable type on the scribes who labored in cold stone monasteries by the light of dripping candles to hand-make copies of age-old manuscripts. With Gutenberg’s technology, it was suddenly possible, for the first time in history, to create a book in a fraction of the time it took to read, let alone copy, one. In 1492, the Abbot of Sponheim in Western Germany saw with alarm that the great scribal tradition was facing a serious threat. So he pulled his quill from its scabbard, grabbed an inkwell, and wrote De Laude Scriptorum (in praise of scribes) in its defense.

There was no time to lose; the Abbot needed to get his message out quickly and widely. This of course is something the scribes could not help him do. So he had his treatise printed. “The content of the Abbot’s book praised the scribes,” Shirky notes, “while its printed form damned them.” 

Shades of the mining museum!

Make Mules Great Again
History is full of these lower case clashes, especially during times of rapid change. People used candles for illumination long after electricity was available to light their homes. The ice trade continued long after the development of electric refrigerators. Despite the President's determination to restore the coal industry to its former glory, automation has already taken over the miner's job. Indeed, the museum in coal country may have had some concern about how much longer coal would be available. According to the Department of Energy, there are more than 6 times as many Americans working in solar power today than working in the mine, and that trend is on a one-way trip.  Even King Canute knew he could not reverse the tide.

But wait: a silver lining. The New York Times reports that electrical transformers and turbines, Navy sonar equipment, colossal beer brewing tanks and other items too massive to move by rail or road are floating once again on the Erie Canal. The Times cites New York State officials who say they expect "more than 200,000 tons of shipping on the canal system in 2017, a milestone not reached since 1993." No sign of any mules yet, but surely President Trump won't leave them behind.

Don't forget Sal!

Basket Case

Almost two weeks have passed since Hillary Clinton told an audience at a fundraiser in New York that "you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables." People are still writing, tweeting and talking about it. For context, the Democratic Presidential candidate said the group includes people who are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it." The other half of Trump's supporters, she said, less disparagingly, "are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change . . .  Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."

Writing in the current edition of TIME, Joe Klein harshly criticizes the candidate's "wobbly" political strategy, or lack of one. The Economist's Lexington column actually has more to say about Trump than about Clinton, but it does observe in passing that Candidate Clinton's statement was "horribly sweeping."

For a blog such as this one, which is interested in branding and communication, among other things, there's a more fundamental -- and non-political -- issue that no one has mentioned. As James Carville, who's been known to give the Clintons advice, might say: "It's the brand, stupid." Standing behind a podium with the slogan "Stronger Together" prominently displayed, Hillary missed a chance to show that her campaign is about inclusion rather than petty divisiveness. The prejudices and phobias she called out in her "deplorables" broadside are anything but petty. But it's a better branding strategy by far to hang the sins on her opponent than on his followers.

It's also important, obvious as this may seem, that as a woman running for President, Hillary has something very powerful going for her that Donald Trump doesn't: her femininity. She owns "maternal" at a time when that could be seen as a healing attribute that aligns perfectly with the embrace and optimism implicit in her "Stronger Together" brand. Instead, though, she has made it possible for Donald Trump to accuse her of "viciously demonising [the] hard-working people" who support him.

Donald Trump in fairness has not shown himself to be any better as a potential Brander-in-chief. His slogan is an almost verbatim lift of "Let's Make America Great Again" from Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign. The wistful phrase clearly resonates with many of his supporters. His team did a good job of reinforcing the message at the Republican Convention by creating a variant for each night of the event: "Make America Safe/Work/First/One Again." It's the backward-looking "again" part of the formulation that's troubling. The "greatness" of Trump's vision is of a mythologized past. That's not out of bounds. A quick look at a Wikipedia list of campaign slogans since 1840 shows that nostalgia is a popular idea. Roosevelt proclaimed "Happy Days Are Here Again" in 1932; Ford's banner in 1976 said "He's Making Us Proud Again." In addition to the slogan that Trump has appropriated, Reagan also gave us "It's Morning Again in America" in 1984.

What's problematical in the "great again" brand promise is that for many voters, particularly among minority groups, the question is not a matter of when America was great, but when -- and how -- it will be. If some of the measures Candidate Trump has proposed should ever become policy, the "great" value proposition may seem even more remote.

As Mario Cuomo famously said, politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But that doesn't excuse them from not taking their own promises seriously. Sadly, many companies have stirring brand messages that have nothing to do with what their leaders say or how they behave. Anyone who watched Elizabeth Warren's recent flensing of Wells Fargo chairman John G. Stumpf will have noticed where she began her comments. It's clear that Senator Warren understands that brand is not really about message, it's about experience. "If you want to find out how strong a company’s ethics are, don’t listen to what its people say. Watch what they do," she read out loud to Mr. Stumpf, quoting rather ironically from Wells Fargo 's own Vision & Values booklet. That's good solid advice for corporate executives, brand managers, politicians and everyone else. Neglect to follow it and you, too, might end up a basket case.