I’m going to have to start a separate category for “Pictures Taken with My Mobile Phone during My Commute,” if I actually survive long enough to implement it. Unfortunately most of the amazing shots I take while I should be driving turn out like this:
This van is transporting the Christian Electrician, complete with a little golden cross logo in the center. I had to click through two Google pages to locate that link because, believe it or not, there are quite a few Christian electricians in New England who explicitly bill themselves as such.
My book club just read Zeitoun (a fast, gripping read), and it made me think about the title character, a Muslim, who selected a rainbow as his company logo without realizing it was a gay symbol. He thought about changing it because he didn’t want to alienate potential clients, but he discovered that there was enough gay custom that he had more work than he could handle just marketing to that niche.
Photo courtesy of my friend A. who took it yesterday on the Common.
Aitch: Mommy, can I tell you something?
Me: You don’t have to ask if you can tell me something. Just tell me.
Aitch: I want to watch the Bruins tonight.
Me: Really?
Aitch: It starts at eight. I’ve got to stay up to watch it. Can I?
Me: Sure, Aitch. You can watch the whole Bruins game if you can tell me one thing.
Aitch: What?
Me: What sport do the Bruins play?
Aitch: Uh….basketball?
I finally got my hands on a copy of Yankee City, William Lloyd Warner’s anthropological study of Newburyport from the early 20th century. As I’ve written about earlier in this space, a small army of academics studied Newburyport up, down, and sideways for almost twenty years, producing this five-volume series about the social structures and economic habits of our little town. For months I’ve been pricing the various volumes on out-of-print sources through Amazon, wondering if I was ordering the right thing or if the book would be in terrible condition. Then I had a brainwave: Hey, I could get it through the library! And one interlibrary loan later, here it is.
(Digression: When I inherited my millions reached the point in my life where income exceeded outflow, I stopped borrowing books from the library. The main reasons are 1. that my typical book-reading postures (over dinner, floating on large bodies of water, frequently both at once) are not library-book friendly, and 2. I have a mental block about returning library books. A third reason, though, which I didn’t realize until I read Super Sad True Love Story (on my Kindle) was that I dislike the smell of old books. SSTLS is set in the near future, where text is streamed via smartphones and “credit poles,” and books are viewed as dirty clutter, redolent of death. The characters go on and on about how nauseating books are, and I was nodding my head in agreement: Yes! That’s exactly how I feel about them! I used to fetishize books, but now I’m more than happy with my library in the Cloud.)
Anyway. I now have Yankee City in my house, and while it does pong, it’s fascinating enough that I don’t care.
Warner, a thorough empiricist, divides the town into six social classes, somewhat confusingly named Upper-Upper, Lower-Upper, Upper-Middle, Lower-Middle, Upper-Lower, and Lower-Lower. This pigeonholing of people into systems, I believe, is what pissed off John Marquand, whose rejoinder to Warner, Point of No Return, I’ve also been meaning to read. (Hey! Maybe the library has it!) Warner favors a dry academic style that is often unintentionally hilarious: here’s an example of his matchless prose:
Large proportions of the upper-upper and and lower-upper houses and almost none of the lower-middle, upper-lower, and lower-lower are big and in good condition. On the other hand, large sections of the lower-lower and upper-lower houses but none of the upper-upper are small and bad….. Houses which are in good or medium repair are of high significant in the three highest classes and of low significance in the three lowest levels…. Bad housing, whether the place be large, medium, or small, is a characteristic of the lower-lower group and no other class is significantly high for all three of those types. Moreover, the lower class does live in significantly low numbers in all types of houses which are in good repair.
News flash: Rich people live in nice houses. Poor people live in crappy houses. We have the data to prove it!
Husband and I frequently debate whether or not there are class divisions in America, and if so what the criteria are for dividing the classes, and whether class prejudice is stronger than race prejudice. Yankee City provided me with a real aha moment; Warner makes it clear that, while there are class divisions, the class system is permeable by design. Although it’s not easy to move between classes, there are social vehicles that provide opportunities for those who wish to do so, most notably the school system, which allows children of different classes to mix, and selected social organizations, which provide the same function for adults. I had always thought of a class system as set of inviolable rules for who sits where; Warner points out, rightly, that this is actually a caste system, not a class system, and that a capitalist economy needs to facilitate a certain amount of class mobility.
Fun fact: At the time of the first study there were 357 “associations” (clubs, charitable societies, women’s leagues, etc.) with over six thousand people occupying twelve thousand memberships — this out of a population of just 16,000, just slightly under what it is today. You think of Great Depression-era people sitting on bread lines and stuffing newspaper in their clothes to keep warm, but they were also apparently going to book club and Junior League, cementing or improving their social station.
The local hospital is constructing a new wing, but has hired non-union electricians to cut costs. The electricians’ union, accordingly, is picketing the hospital and associated medical office buildings with signs bearing web site addresses such as “drsmithexposed.com,” which detail malpractice settlements for doctors associated with the hospital.
So now whenever I need to, say, visit my endocrinologist to see if my cancer has recurred (it hasn’t! yay!), I have to run a gauntlet of protesters lending the hospital the delightful ambience of an abortion clinic. Their cause may be just, but this is stress I don’t need.
What irks me more than anything is how ineffectual the whole thing is. I mean, if I see union pickets in front of my supermarket, I drive on two-tenths of a mile to the next one and buy my provisions there. The store that’s gouging its employees suffers the short-term consequence of the loss of my weekly grocery money, giving it further incentive to settle the matter quickly. See? Effective.
Now here I am driving up to my doctor’s office, seeking an adjustment for my thyroid medication. I spy the protest signs. Do I call another endocrinologist in Boston who’s on the right side of the angels and electricians? Contact my primary care doctor to arrange for the necessary referral? Fax my current doctor to have all my records transferred? Wait four months until the new doctor can see me? Hell, no. I keep on trucking as large men with sensational signs sneer at me, and my doctor receives my copay and insurance money as usual. How does this inconvenience anyone but me?
The things that attracted us to Port City were the excellent schools, proximity to the ocean, and the tough but fair juvenile justice system.