The great engineering writer Henry Petroski, who has explored subjects as mundane as pencils and as sweeping as American infrastructure, always brings out the human element in both the design and the use of engineered products, and it is that aspect of his work which makes it fascinating instead of dryly technical. Mr. Petroski reminds us that the products of engineers and designers are wrought by fallible humans for the use of other fallible humans, and since humans have not changed greatly over the past 300 years or 3,000 years, then ultimately engineering and design are always processes of back and forth and of trial and error, even after a university education has instilled thousands of years of experience into its practitioners. Things can and do still go wrong, largely because of human error and human desires.
Take the humble bottle cap, or “crown” as it is known in the trade, and twist it off. Can’t do it? Then it’s a pry off cap, or crown, and requires an implement for dislodging it. Why the different designs? Isn’t there a best practice, and if so why don’t all makers of products put into bottles adhere to it? Specifically, bottlers of beer, some of whom use twist off caps, while others use pry off caps. Isn’t beer beer, no matter how it’s bottled? According to craft beer makers, no. William Painter, an American mechanical engineer, invented the pry off cap in 1892, and it remained the standard means of capping bottled beers and sodas until the 1960s, when twist off caps with good sealing capacity came on the market.
The prop genie bottle, with stopper, from the 1960s television show I Dream of Jeannie. Photo taken in June 2011 by Eva Rinaldi.
Major bottlers soon replaced their pry off caps with twist off, and customers were satisfied since the beers and sodas they bought were not flat due to carbon dioxide leaks going out of the liquid inside the bottles. There may have been slight leaks of oxygen into the bottles, but not enough that the average drinker of major brand American beers would notice. When craft beer makers first came onto the market in a big way in the 1980s and 1990s, many of them decided to eschew twist off caps in favor of pry off caps for several reasons. The machinery for pry off caps was cheaper than for twist off caps, which suited small scale brewers operating on tight margins. Then there was the slight difference in the tightness of the seal between pry off and twist off, which was more of a factor thirty years ago than it remains today after improvements in twist off cap seals. Lastly there was the impression that twist off caps were for cheap, indifferent domestic lagers, while most European imports still came with old fashioned crowns or stoppers, and an impression of higher quality along with their higher prices, an impression which lingers to this day.
It is perhaps the last reason, the purely psychological one, that retains a foundation for using pry off caps, and of course it amounts to pure snobbery. The snobbery over twist off caps is even worse when it comes to consumer perceptions about wine. The craft brewers contradict themselves, too, when they plump for selling their beers in cans instead of bottles. They claim, with good reason, that because of improved linings for aluminum cans there is no longer any reason for consumers to be prejudiced against buying beer in cans. Fair enough, but just as with twist off caps for bottled beer, there remains the perception among consumers that beer in cans is inferior not merely because of possible taint from the container, but because for years beer in cans was the cheap, low quality preference of working class people.
Chubby Checker had a big hit in 1961 with “Let’s Twist Again”, the follow up to his 1960 hit “The Twist”. Some folks may feel the follow up is the better song, but it doesn’t matter much in the end and comes down to personal preference.
Let’s stop pretending then and admit the main reason to crown a beer bottle with a pry off cap is to send a signal to the consumer that what’s inside the bottle is quality stuff. It may well be, but snobbery around rituals should not be the determining factor. That’s as bad as wine snobs who get upset over twist off caps even though vintners and wine aficionados alike claim twist off caps are an improvement to the quality of wines not meant to be aged extensively but drunk within a few years of bottling. And as to craft sodas in bottles with pry off caps, that is merely an excuse to charge a premium for a product of dubious value. At least beer and wine producers can lay claim to some health benefits for their nectars, despite their consumption by mere mortals who allow their preconceived notions to get in the way of enjoying a good drink.
— Techly
Supporters of the current president gathered outside the State Capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona, on January 25, to protest immigration reform measures being debated by state legislators. They undercut any interest in their arguments by badgering and hectoring brown skinned legislators, state office workers, and even schoolchildren on a field trip as they walked in the vicinity of the Capitol, presumptively proclaiming them illegal aliens, while giving white skinned folks a pass. They reached the epitome of their belligerent ignorance when one of them challenged the citizenship status of State Representative Eric Descheenie, a Native American of Navajo descent.
Besides the ignorance of challenging such a person on his right to be here, there is the sheer gall of doing so. The ignorance has always been there with some people, but the gall has risen to the surface lately on account of how emboldened they feel by the angry rhetoric of their Supreme Leader in the White House. Many of these particular protesters in Phoenix were armed, as well, and their allies in the police stood idly by while they harassed the targets of their hatred.
1848 Mexican Cession of territory after the Mexican-American War. 2008 map by Kballen.
The Viceroyalty of New Spain in 1819. 2013 map by Giggette.
The police were supposedly studiously allowing the protesters room to express themselves freely, as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Strange how the ideology of protesters seems to affect how the police enforce First Amendment rights, though of course nothing can be proven. A similarly scrupulous desire for allowance of free expression strangely affected law enforcement at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August, and that after an incident in July in Charlottesville when the cops tear gassed for no very good reason counter protesters at a KKK gathering.
Since self-reflection and a balanced view of history are traits that are probably either non-existent or very low on the list for some of the denser supporters of the Ignoramus-in-Chief, any appeal here will fall only on their deaf ears, if at all, and the words will serve merely as preaching to the choir. Nevertheless, on the principle that a trickle of water may eventually lead to a baptism, it is worth a try. Has the schizophrenic nature of Republican anti-immigrant rhetoric never struck a discordant chord with any of these Know Nothings? The fact that their economic betters in the Republican establishment, the ones who back their Supreme Leader behind the scenes solely on account of his capacity to put yet more money in their pockets, have no desire to change current immigration policy because it suits their business interests to have cheap, exploitable labor. It has always been so.
From the 1994 Robert Zemeckis film Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks as the title character repeats a bit of received wisdom, “Stupid is as stupid does”. Economically and politically the beliefs of the protesters at the Arizona Capitol will never get anywhere because they fly in the face of the moneyed interests who pull all the strings. So what is it all for, then? Blowing off steam from the angry white European descent base of the new hard right Republicans. The rich ones aren’t angry; they have no reason to be, since they are getting everything they want. It’s the people stuck in the economic levels below that who are angry. Why don’t they get angry with the people above them who are ripping them off? Good question, but one for a different day. They are angry with the people they see supplanting them as the most important demographic in this country, fragmenting solid white bread into hundreds of permutations of bagels and tortillas and pita pockets, many of them gluten-free.
Why do they vent their hatred and anger on brown skinned immigrants? Who else is left? The economic and political arguments of the anti-immigrant crowd largely fall apart under scrutiny, at least they do if this country is to continue to operate under the same principles it has going back hundreds of years, when the ancestors of the current anti-immigrants made their way here with little government interference and then, with the active encouragement of the government, violently shouldered aside the indigenous peoples who had been here thousands of years before them. It is a dangerous game that Republican leaders are playing, however, standing aside to let the angry base blow steam so that the moneyed interests can loot the country while everyone is distracted. They are counting on the casualties falling among groups they care nothing about other than their utility to them, such as liberals and immigrants. The people steering the Thief-in-Chief and his hard core minions around like a crazed nozzle spitting vituperation need to understand, though, that high pressure steam has a history of escaping control and blowing up in everyone’s faces.
— Vita
Early Native American tribal territories, superimposed on the present day western United States. 1970 map by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Geological Survey. Where’s Arizona, and where are all the white folks of European descent?
Players at a game ofCatan during the April 2016 Wikimedia Hackathon in Jerusalem, Israel. Photo by Ariel Elinson.
The German board gameSettlers of Catan, now known simply as Catan, first published by Klaus Teuber in 1995, changed ideas around the world about what board games could be and led the renaissance in the form that has seen huge growth over the last 20 years, primarily among young adults. Catan is competitive, just like many board games of the past like Monopoly and Risk, but unlike those games it does not eliminate some players before the game is over, and therefore everyone who starts the game holds on to a chance at winning until the end. It is competitive, but not reductive.
That game dynamic, which has come to define most of the board games coming from Europe, and particularly Germany, in the last 20 years has become known by the shorthand Eurogames. The games are overall competitive in nature while incorporating elements of cooperation and degrees of engagement with, or isolation from, one player to the other players as suits an individual’s personality or strategy. The character of the games can be seen as socialist rather than capitalist, as in Monopoly. Warring and confrontation are similarly sidelined in favor of building or collecting. A player still strives to outdo the others, though not entirely at their expense. The games are not zero sum games, where one player ends up with everything and the others are left in ruins.
A balloon of the Monopoly mascot, Mr. Monopoly, also known as Rich Uncle Pennybags, at a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in the early 2000s. Photo by Fluffybuns.
The genius of these games coming out of Europe is how they tap into the better parts of our nature without resorting to banality, which of course would ensure they got played exactly once before finding a place on a closet shelf, there to be ignored ever after. The game designers understand the duality of human nature, and they give play to both sides, and in the best games, such as Catan, they appear to have achieved a balance, a yin and yang duality, if you like.
A scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, with Matthew Modine as Pvt. J.T. “Joker” Davis being upbraided for not going along with the program. Warning: foul language. Many of the older games, like Monopoly, much loved as they were, gave vent primarily to the aggressive, greedy side of our nature, and people mistakenly thought that was who we were, and all we were. Pillaging and destruction of competitors may be all fun and games for a certain limited part of our psyches, and honesty demands we acknowledge that is part of who we are. But it is only a part, and the rest of our spirit seems to demand we fulfill our need to build and create, urged on still by that core desire to do it as well as we possibly can, and if that results in greater and grander returns than everyone else can achieve, then so much the better. All in good fun, of course.
― Vita
Right wing media has its knickers in a twist the past week over the findings by a Boston University theater history professor of some racist performances of “Jingle Bells” from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. The professor, Kyna Hill, was researching the origins of the song and trying to settle whether it was written by James Lord Pierpont in Medford, Massachusetts, or in Savannah, Georgia. Ultimately the song’s point of origin remained unclear, but during the course of her research Professor Hill discovered that the first performance was in 1857 at a theater in Boston, and the white performers wore blackface.
Sleigh Ride in Winter, a painting by Rudolf Frentz the Elder (1831-1918).
Professor Hill never claimed that the song as it is performed today is racist, but that did not deter some right wing media outlets such as Breitbart News from attributing that and other claims to her in an effort to paint her as an advocate of political correctness run amok. Right wing media enjoys fanning the flames of anger among its adherents, and since anger is the fuel of authoritarians, the readers and consumers of Breitbart News and other such outlets are always ready to flame up from a slow burn to a white hot conflagration. If there are not enough true stories available to fan their outrage, then the right wing will have to invent some false stories. The trendy term for that is “fake news”.
All this anger over ginned up controversies surrounding Christmas has been going on for a century, ever since the industrialist Henry Ford began muttering vaguely anti-Semitic remarks about a “War on Christmas”, as the right wing has since dubbed it. Ford thought Jewish owners of department stores were engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the Christianity of Christmas, all while lining their pockets by turning it into a largely secular, mercantile holiday. Never mind that no one twisted the arms of white Christians to engage in an orgy of spending for Christmas. The important thing was to direct right wing anger at an Other as American society turned away from the Currier and Ives mid-nineteenth century vision of Christmas (the same time as the early performances of “Jingle Bells”) to a more cosmopolitan, polyglot vision brought by the waves of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In Henry Ford’s day, Jews could be openly cast as the Other. After World War II and the Holocaust, that was no longer acceptable, and vilification of the Other settled on Communists, or Reds. The latest target of right wing objectification of an ideological and cultural Other is political correctness, a movement that started in the 1980s and has at times veered into ludicrously priggish stifling of dissenting opinion and alternative behavior, making it easy for the right wing to get outraged about it. Some people mock the excesses of political correctness, while right wingers alternate between mockery and spitting rage. Since political correctness is neither a religion, like Judaism, nor an entire political system, like Communism, the casting of its adherents as the Other by the right wing does not follow the same strand of unalloyed hatred.
Viewed by the right wing, and by some in the rest of society, advocates of political correctness are sociological scolds who are bent on taking away every last bit of cultural heritage of white European culture in America. The Nanny State description sums up the right wing view of the political correctness movement. When a story like the “Jingle Bells” one comes along then, right wingers are primed to pounce on it and vent their anger by putting words into Professor Hill’s mouth, making her a cipher for opinions she never expressed. In the “War on Christmas”, the right wingers proclaim “you are either with us or against us”. As a reward for her scholarship, poor Professor Hill got caught up in the culture war and got set up and knocked down as the right wing’s straw woman of the moment.
― Vita
“Charlie, that’s beneath you,” Steve Bannon told interviewer Charlie Rose on the 60 Minutes television program this past Sunday, referring to Rose’s remark that we are a nation of immigrants except for the Native Americans. Bannon’s statement was bizarre and nonsensical, and seemed to come from his own peculiarly politicized vision of American history in which admitting that European immigrants largely stole the Western Hemisphere from Native Americans in a shameless display of cupidity and genocide is somehow nothing more than shameful leftist propaganda. So much for honestly facing the truth.
Charlie Brown parade balloon at the 2016 Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City. Photo by Midtownguy2012. Maybe Steve Bannon was referring to all the immigrants in the streets of New York City below the floating Charlie Brown balloon.
Even though Mr. Bannon is out of the White House now, his legacy lives on in the administration’s immigration policy, specifically the recent announcement about ending the Obama era DREAMer policy of granting a path to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. Mr. Bannon does not appear to care for immigrants, legal or otherwise, no matter what sort of intellectual gloss he slops onto his elitism. He is an unsavory man who sees nothing wrong with declaring war on the brown-skinned peoples of the earth, as long as people other than him and his kind are doing the fighting. The short termed White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, in his own succinct way, characterized Bannon absolutely correctly. Mr. Bannon is someone who takes himself too seriously, and is accustomed to overawed admirers reinforcing his own high opinion of himself.
A clip from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and here featuring Robert Duvall as the gung ho Colonel Kilgore.
For all that, what do Mr. Bannon’s ideas amount to? Not much other than what can be found in the writings of Rudyard Kipling – the White Man’s Burden and all that – but without Kipling’s compassion. Steve Bannon is a man out of his time, which rightly should be about 150 years ago. Perhaps that was when America was great for him and his kind, or at least it was if he ignored the multitude of recent German and Irish immigrants, the millions of African slaves recently freed after the bloody Civil War, and all the Mexicans still at large in the new territories and states of the American southwest as a result of the giant land grab known as the Mexican-American War.
“Charlie Don’t Surf” from the outstanding 1980 triple album Sandanista!by the English band The Clash.
In that world, Mr. Bannon would no doubt have felt at home because his cognitive dissonance about American history would not have been noted by his contemporaries. He would instead have been part of the mainstream of Old Boy elites riding high on the backs of immigrant and poor persons’ labor, while snootily ignoring that fact and looking down on them, the source of his wealth, and of his leisure to engage in what amounts to little more than mental masturbation. Maybe that’s what he meant when he said “Charlie, that’s beneath you.”
― Ed.
The First Thanksgiving, 1621, an early twentieth century painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863-1930). The painting portrays Native Americans as guests partaking of the bounty provided by The Pilgrims, while by all honest accounts of the period the Native Americans generously saved the newcomers from privation in their early years of struggling to survive in the unfamiliar surroundings of the New World. Steve Bannon would no doubt find comfort and confirmation in the relationship of the two groups as portrayed in this painting.
The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12 ended up being more about the neo-Nazi version of white supremacy than the purported issue of memorials to the Confederacy and whether or not they represent another version of white supremacy. Despite that difference, it hardly matters to the victims whether white supremacy is rooted in Nazism and World War II or slavery and the Civil War. The neo-Nazis merely co-opted the issue of removing a statue of Robert E. Lee from a public park in order to further their own hateful agenda.
The backlash to the rally in Charlottesville has had the effect of expediting removal of Confederate memorials around the country. Instead of preserving memorials to the Confederacy, an issue which the neo-Nazis obviously had an interest in only as a flash point, the effect of their demonstration has been to bring to the attention of the general public the real purpose of many of those memorials and why it is a good idea to remove them. The majority of the statues, for instance, were put up in the Jim Crow era, often outside courthouses, and it is clear from dedication speeches of the time that the statues were meant to serve the dual purpose of preserving the memory of the rebellion as well as reminding black people and their few white allies that the old guard was still in charge, no matter what the Constitution of the United States had to say about equality of the races.
Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), writer of “This Land Is Your Land”, performing in 1943. The sign on his guitar says “This machine kills fascists”. Photo by Al Aumuller of the New York World-Telegram.
Another bump in confederate memorializing came during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. Through the Jim Crow era assertion of the old order and then reassertion during the Civil Rights era the rest of the country took little note of the symbols being put up all around the South. Visitors might think some of the memorializing was odd to the extent that they noted it at all, but for the most part they put it down to a “Southern thing” in which it was best not to interfere. The region’s inhabitants, black and white, surely understood why the memorials were there, though some of the white people among them chose to gloss over their uglier meaning by looking at them only as symbols of plucky defiance against Northern aggression, ignoring the centrality of slavery to the conflict, which was written down in the Declarations of Secession by their own leaders.
Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a region sacred to many Native Americans.
Now that the issue of Confederate memorials’ role in asserting white supremacy has come to national attention, it is perhaps time to start examining white supremacy memorials in every context across the country. The idea expressed by the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville that white people have an inherent right to lead this nation and subjugate other groups is self-evidently asinine. Native Americans are the only true Americans, and they of course are not white people. It is entirely unlikely at this point, however, that hundreds of millions of people, black and white, African and European, will board ships and return to their lands of origin, much as the real Native Americans may wish that at least some troublemakers would do just that.
Like it or not, this land is now populated by one big, argumentative family. Some of us hate each other, and it appears that will always be so, but the idea that one group of the family, namely white people – and in particular a subset of privileged white heterosexual males – should continue to dominate the others is an evil premise. Stow your petty, self-pitying grievances and move on, so that when we all get together for Thanksgiving we can have peace in the family.
― Vita
An August 1993 performance at Wolf Trap in Virginia. Arlo Guthrie’s daughters sing backup, his son plays keyboards, and Pete Seeger’s grandson is the singer in between Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger on stage.
Scientists are attempting to bring the Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, back to life from preserved genetic material. The Passenger Pigeon once numbered up to 3 billion in North America, but by 1914 the last one had died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Scientists are also working on reviving the nearly extinct American Chestnut, Castanea dentata, which had once totaled over 3 billion trees in North America before a bark fungus accidentally imported from Asia with some Chinese Chestnuts, Castanea mollissima, destroyed almost all of the trees in the first half of the twentieth century.
Male Passenger Pigeon; digital painting by Tim Hough.
American Chestnut tree in central Maryland in 1914; photo by United States Forest Service.
The loss or near loss of both these species greatly changed the ecosystem of eastern North America to the point that a visitor time traveling from the nineteenth century would be hard pressed to recognize it as the same place, never mind all the modern infrastructure of concrete, steel, and asphalt. Both species were casualties of the first stages of globalization. The Passenger Pigeons had co-existed with Native Americans for millennia, but it was the mass immigration of Europeans which eventually drove them to extinction through habitat loss and hunting on a massive scale. The American Chestnuts had no immunity to the fungus which arrived with the shipment of Chinese Chestnuts, which had developed some immunity due to having evolved with the fungus in their native habitat.
Now scientists are attempting to restore these two species once so numerous that they helped define the environment of eastern North America. Both restorations will require the expertise of geneticists, along with help from ornithologists and botanists, as appropriate. Ultimately the success of both projects will depend on the cooperation of the public by giving both species space and peace, two things that humans struggle to allow for the other beings sharing this planet. People were responsible for the demise of both the Passenger Pigeon and the American Chestnut, and with the ingenuity people are known for perhaps they can restore both species. Successful restoration will also require two things people have not often enough been known for, which are a generosity of spirit towards life and restraint of their violently destructive impulses.
― Vita
