Could a "Boom" Knock Us Right Out of the Ring?

The London Review of Books had a page-and-a-half “Diary” feature in the 7 February 2013 issue. Rebecca Solnit was the author, and her topic was the Silicon Valley economic boom and how it has affected housing availability and prices in San Francisco and the surrounding area. Where high-paid, high-tech workers (“routinely make six-figure salaries, not necessarily beginning with a 1”) commute 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 hours to work, the corporations they work for provide buses with wifi, so employees can start work before arriving at their offices (and unfortunately undermining community support for improved public transportation).

“Where orchards grew Apple stands.” 

Why does that one sentence make me, an Apple user, so sad? Because I live in orchard country? Because I could live more easily without the Internet than without fruit?  Once wild and creative San Francisco, now a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, is the scene of regular evictions, and prospective home buyers bid up property minute by minute.

It’s a boom.

The story was fascinating enough (to me, it was fascinating in the manner of a disaster story), but then Solnit changed the subject somewhat: “San Francisco’s tech boom has often been compared to the Gold Rush....” In the mining boom, there was a population explosion, runaway inflation, and, while the boom lasted, high wages for the workers flooding in. Booms are like that.

The oil and gas boomtowns of the present, in Wyoming, North Dakota and Alberta, among other places, follow this model. Lots of money sloshes around boomtowns, but everyday life is shaped by scarcity, not abundance. The boom workers are newcomers. They work long hours, earn high wages, drive up the cost of housing for the locals, drive out some locals.... Like a virus, mining destroys its host and then moves on. There are ghost towns across the west full of dying businesses with the landscape around them ground into heaps leaching toxic residue.

Silicon Valley, she writes, returning to her main subject, is different from mining towns in many ways—“clean, quiet work, and here to stay in one form or another.” It’s the similarities that interest her, though—the “mass displacements and the casual erasure of what was here before.” Mining or high-tech, she is saying, there are similar losses for those not in on the boom.

I couldn’t help thinking that there is another connection between the two kinds of booms that Solnit did not explore. This is not criticism: she had a certain focus, certain points she wanted to make, and the piece does that very well. But the truth is that there could be no Silicon Valley industry, no high-tech boom, without nonrenewable mineral resources. Mining is part of San Francisco's boom today.

Okay, I’m not a hermit, and I write this blog on a laptop. I even have a cheap, pay-as-you-go cell phone for emergencies. It’s almost impossible to be an American these days and not be connected. As I've said before, I’m not a Luddite. But neither do I want the electronic devices in my life to proliferate like those animated brooms poor Mickey Mouse, would-be sorcerer, had to deal with in “Fantasia.”

Soil, water, food grown in soil, minerals under the earth—these must be protected and conserved. It doesn’t make sense to pollute water and soil by mining and processing finite, nonrenewable materials. It isn't in California's backyard, but the high-tech industry is not as "clean" as it appears from that one geographical area. We can do better. We can insist that the industry do better.

Does all this seem a long, long way from your backyard? No, it's right at your fingertips!

Guest Blogger on Life and Death

Dawn King regularly writes her own blog, on topics ranging from her dog Katie to interstate highway truck safety. As this year’s first guest blogger on Books in Northport, she is allowing me to repost something she wrote shortly before Christmas. No further introduction should be necessary: everything is explained below:

You may have heard that the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration, part of the Department of Transportation) issued a new rule this week on the hours that a pilot is allowed to work before having to rest.  They lowered the number of hours by one and made some other changes.  It’s not enough, letting them fly one hour less, but it’s a start.  This change was prompted by the crash more than a year ago of a commuter plane in New York state, where the pilots had been flying long hours and were fatigued.

Well, what you probably haven’t heard is that the FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier SAFETY Administration) also a part of the DOT (Department of Transportation) just issued a new rule regarding the hours of service (HOS) for truck drivers.    We’ve been working for over a year with them, hoping to get the 11 consecutive hours they’re allowed to drive reduced to 10.  Even 10 is too many; most of us work a 40 hour week and we’re exhausted.  Drivers can (under this new rule) drive 70 hours a week,  30 hours over a normal work week.

The ‘new’ HOS rule was issued late today.  Though they made some changes geared toward safety – they reduced the total number of driving hours per week from 82 to 70, they mandate that drivers get some sleep overnight – they left the 11 hours of consecutive driving in the rule.  This is the most dangerous part of the rule, and the part we worked very hard to get reduced.

Tonight I wrote a letter to Anne Ferro, the Administrator of the FMSCA, the woman I’ve met with on several occasions, to express my displeasure.  I’m sharing it with you now:

Dear Anne,

With tears in my eyes and a tremendous ache in my heart  I read tonight, on the eve of the 7th  anniversary of my father’s death at the hands of a fatigued semi driver, the new HOS rule.  You and I have met.  You’ve looked at Dad’s photo, the picture of the car, heard his story. You listened when I spoke about how he fixed dangerous things, nodded in agreement when I said that fatigued driving could be fixed.  You hugged me and said you knew your work wasn’t fast enough for me.  I thought you recognized the opportunity you had to make a difference, to save lives, to put safety ahead of commercial profit.

But you left the most dangerous part of the HOS rule intact.  You are continuing to allow drivers to drive eleven hours in a row.  Your own agency studies indicate that driving eleven hours contributes to fatigue related crashes.  Your own surveys tell you that drivers report driving fatigued, report falling asleep while driving.  Your own research tells you the truth.  Yet you allowed pressure from wealthy and profit oriented organizations to convince you that profit is more important than the public’s safety.  Ensuring safety on our roads is your number one job.  Safety is your number one responsibility.

In the same week that the FAA responded to the problem of fatigued airline pilots and lowered the number of hours pilots can work before they must rest, you ignored the fact that fatigued truck drivers are just as dangerous.  If even 1% of last year’s 3,675 semi related deaths were caused by fatigued semi drivers, the 367 people killed should cause national outrage.  An agency such as the FMCSA should sit up and take notice.   Two people died last year in fatigue related airline crashes and the FAA responded.  Critics of the FAA ruling say it didn’t go far enough, and I agree, but at least they are moving in the right direction.

How many more people have to die before our government recognizes that profits can not come before the safety of the innocent public?  Don’t you think that we’d all be willing to pay a few more dollars for that microwave it we knew that we could save lives by getting it to the store just a bit later?  Under this ‘new’ rule people will continue to die because of fatigued truck drivers.  Regardless of the once a week restart rule and the mandated overnight sleep, the fact is that driving eleven hours is fatiguing.  So more people die, more families get that call, more lives are shattered.  Profit wins,  but the public pays the price.  It’s just so wrong.

Dad was killed seven years ago tomorrow.  I promised him that I’d make a difference and I’m not giving up.  But I have to say that tonight I feel more than a little discouraged.  You and I sat in a meeting, with other family members who have suffered terrible loss, and I told you then that of all of us in that room, you were the only one with the power to make our roads safer.  I don’t think you understood what a grave responsibility you had.

You were our best hope for change.  And tonight I feel saddened, betrayed, confused and angry.

-Dawn King

So.  Tomorrow is the 7th anniversary of Dad’s death.  What has really changed in the world of truck safety?  I’m working now with two families that have suffered loss this past year.  They’re going through the initial stages of pain and outrage and fear and confusion and grief that we went through.  They want it fixed.  So did we.  So DO we.  It’s just so hard, sometimes, in the face of such overwhelming opposition, to keep fighting the fight.

But we can’t let them win.  Because if we do we all lose.  Every last one of us.  So tomorrow, on a day when Dad will be on my mind even more than usual I will begin the fight again.  We’re not going away.  One step forward, two steps back doesn’t mean we won’t prevail.  They want us to be quiet and go away.

Not going to happen.

It is little enough I can do by reposting Dawn’s letter and commentary here. I ask anyone who reads this post to send a link to friends and family. Let’s see if we can help Dawn and her cause. We’ll be helping ourselves and everyone in the country if we can make our roads safer in this new year. Thank you, Dawn.

Vroom, vroom!

The real University ... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salary and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries.... – Robert M. Pirsig, ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE

Life has been very busy lately, with the season heating up. That’s metaphorically speaking. We did have a couple of beautifully summery days when young people shed shoes on downtown streets before the temperature plunged again, getting down into the 30s at night. Not, I'm happy to say, before my morel bonanza or before I finally this year, for the first time, got the wild asparagus before it went to seed, but it's been hard to be cold again after being warm. (Spring, that fickle young thing!) My straw bale gardening project is coming along, too, and I’ll be posting something about that soon; for today, however, it’s a philosophical road trip. Hop on! Don’t be scared! Philosophy will not hurt you!

One of the several reading groups I’m in is a kind of support group for a young man in difficult circumstances (to say the least) who is making a herculean effort to finish his high school work from far off-campus. Four or five of us are reading books “with” him for his last elective credit, sharing our impressions after he has written up his. Our current book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I read for the first time only 14 years ago, having stayed away from it for years out of some kind of overly fastidious feeling that anything that popular couldn’t be that good. Surprise—it was. I'm currently halfway through for my second reading and realize I hardly remember anything from my first. (The one part I do remember I haven't gotten to yet.) I am really glad to be rediscovering this book.

The narrator gives the name Phaedrus to the self he was before his hospitalization and shock treatment for mental illness. He, the narrator, refers to Phaedrus in the third person because he himself is "not that person any more." In what ways not? Well, a big way is that he has lost most of his memories of that earlier life. The narrator also describes the way Phaedrus dealt with other people, implying that he, the narrator, is different, but already I’m wondering if this is true.

ZAMM is a road trip novel as well as a philosophical novel. The narrator and his son travel cross-country with a married couple, through prairie, plains and mountains, with moments high and low along the way. Here is my strongest praise for the book: It is so well written that I do not skip the sections on motorcycle maintenance. When the four travelers reach their destination, the town where Phaedrus taught in the English department, Chris, the narrator’s son, remembers some of the streets and the school where his father taught and fills in some memories of that past for his father. We get the picture that this was not a happy time for the family.

For me the orienting theme of this book is ghosts. From the first time Chris brings up the subject of ghosts as the travelers are sitting around the campfire, the narrator uses it for his philosophical musings. The imagination conjures up phantoms of all kinds, whether former selves, other souls or forms of ideas through which we see the world. Are they "real"? If they are not, is anything?

The part of the book that has stayed with me, a part still ahead in my re-reading, is the seminar room. Ha! Seminar room--or torture chamber? I remember it well. I knew that room myself. I was there. How will it be revisiting it this time around? I’ll get back to you on this.

P.S. I take it back. This is a scary book.

P.P.S. The seminar room was not always a torture chamber. It depended on which professor was giving the seminar.

Book Review: HOW TO READ THE AIR

“All angry men are depressingly the same, and my father was no different.”

The father in Dinaw Mengestu’s second novel, How to Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), fled from Ethiopia to Sudan, stowed away on a cargo ship to Europe and eventually found his way to Peoria, Illinois. There he was eventually joined by the girl he had married in Addis Ababa but hadn’t seen for three years. Not surprisingly, the two were strangers to one another. The narrator is their son, Jonas Woldemariam, who tells his father and mother’s story along with his own.

The novel opens with Yosef and Mariam. The parents’ story is presented in small segments through the book as a slow-motion time capsule, the essence of their troubled marriage distilled by their son into a single day before he, Jonas, was born, before his father had yet been told of his wife’s pregnancy, a day on which Yosef and Mariam left their Peoria home on what was intended to be a vacation trip to Nashville.

Chapter II opens with a flash-forward:

Six months before I left my wife, Angela, and began retracing my parents’ route through the Midwest, my father passed away in the boardinghouse he had been living in for ten years.

In their respective childhoods, Angela’s father disappeared from her life without explanation, and Jonas sought to escape his father’s violence by making himself invisible, so it is not surprising that this young couple finds marriage difficult. On their first social occasion together, they discover a delight in playful invention and, over time, invent a shared history for themselves, but in the end it is the creative, invented stories Jonas tells her that erode Angela’s trust in him. By constantly retreating from her and from truth, he pushes her away.

Jonas’s most elaborate invention, however, is not one he creates for or with Angela but the one he tells his high school English students. Setting aside course work, he starts in one day and continues for several days, spinning out a fictional history for his father in the same way he had formerly elaborated on the asylum requests of clients in the immigration center where he and Angela met. In this way, the author lets the narrator give his father two pasts, one day of an unhappy and violent marriage, and months of fear and poverty as a displaced person.

Is the single day less invented than the saga? The way I read the book, the imagined detail Jonas gives to the slowly unrolling day in his parents’ life allows him to see his distant mother as an individual, with her own hopes and dreams, fears, disappointments and moments of happiness, while the twists and turns of the saga he invents for his angry father does the same for that parent. The truth is that Jonas received little in the way of concern or affection from either parent and had no siblings or friends to cushion his childhood loneliness. A lonely child, he naturally carries his defenses with him into adulthood.

...I had always suspected that at some point in my life, while still living with my parents and their daily battles, I had gone numb as a tactical strategy, perhaps at exactly that moment when we’re supposed to be waking up to the world and stepping into our own.

All that said, I do not call this (as one reviewer did) a tragic story. True, it lacks a “happy ending,” but the last page is anything but a tragedy, as I read it. The following passage is not the last in the book, nor part of the last chapter (I’ll not spoil the ending for you), but conveys how much Jonas has experienced and learned in his three-year marriage:

There were vast swaths of my life that I knew if I looked at closely I would come to regret, and I was certain that soon enough I was going to find the time to do that. I’d regret and wonder, and then do so again until all known ground was covered. This was certainly part of the cost that had to be paid.

One of the specific things he learned was the importance of seeing:

I had walked for a long time with my eyes half closed. ...[I]f one was really looking, which was what I felt I was finally doing—looking, with neither judgment nor fear at what was around me—then that was enough to say you had truly been there.

To wake up to life, to begin to see—surely these are enormous gains for the fictional narrator, as they would be for any human being.

Among the many new novels dealing with the immigrant experience (there are many good memoirs, too), How to Read the Air stands out for me as a unique fictional treatment of the social and emotional isolation felt by many immigrants and their American-born children. The subtlety of the writing allows the reader’s involvement in the story to build organically and almost imperceptibly until the last surprising page.