And another Thanksgiving tradition ...

"Football is the quintessential American sport.  Every play begins with a meeting and ends with an act of violence."

-- Michael Kinsley (I believe)

Cui dono hunc libellum?

It's not Catullus, but it's close.

It's also the phrase that came to my mind while looking at the first book printed in North America, a psalter published by Stephen Day in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1639.  Called the Bay Psalm Book, it sits in the Houghton Library at Harvard and is as valued by book collectors as a Gutenberg Bible or a First Folio of Shakespeare.

What an odd little book, hunc libellum.  What a lovely little book, lepidum hunc libellum.

Imagine coastal Massachusetts of the 1630s, and how it must have seemed to the European mind. Its impenetrably dark woods emitting wild and strange sounds crowded these white semi-literate settlers at every turn, almost pushing them back into the sea.  In these dark woods, an unknown and "savage race" of native peoples speaking no language ever seen or heard in Europe eyed them with great suspicion and intentions unknown.  From 90F in late August to 8F and 5 feet of snow in early February, the extreme swings of temperature and climate were as disorienting as they were potentially deadly. Every plant new to sight and smell and taste was a savior or a murderer depending on its toxicity.  Unidentified beasts lurked deep in the dark land, growling, browsing, climbing, scratching, howling, as if man needed any further reminder that he was granted no God-given dominion here.

All of this, all of it, was what a few English settlers saw and felt in those first years on these shores.  And what did they decide to do?  They took their latest technology, their most advanced item, the printing press, and they published a bunch of songs that a Jewish tribe wrote down on papyrus in the arid Near Eastern desert sometime 2,500 years before.

What an odd little book, hunc libellum.  Its leather binding protected the pages which survived the cold winters, the floods, the snows, the diseases, the animals, the attacks, the fires. Like St. Peter upon his rock so these Protestants upon this book in this strange and hostile land founded their churches, their universities, their traditions, their laws.  From this book, steeped by the brew of time, sprang a kaleidoscope of culture, like the rainbow hair from the 1960s pop artist Peter Max.  America is the kaleidoscope.  America is the rainbow.

All you need is ... ?

Crowd sourcing democracy

In democracies, elections are the moments when the tectonic plates of political alignment shift.  The  pressure that moves these plates derives in part from subterranean drivers of the economy.  When these fundamental drivers change, politics needs to incorporate this new reality in a timely manner.  When the politics are not flexible enough to do that, and new and changing needs get no hearing, then the public discourse grows harsher and radical and sudden shifts become more likely. Think of the 19th century transformation from agrarian to industrial economies in North America and Europe as an example.  Technological change produced massive social change and a reordering of society.  Political theory and practice struggled mightily to make sense of this.  Whether through Marxism or  through capitalism, the ripples are still felt today.  But change continues. American politics struggles at this moment on how to change social support systems that were created at the height of our industrialization process -- dating from before the Second World War.  The American economy that existed when those were created has long since disappeared.  Our politics is working on how to have this tectonic shift reflected elsewhere in our lives.  And now, with the acceleration of the Information Age, we face new challenges. 

What our Founding Fathers left behind is still quite remarkable.  The democratic impulse combined with a broad franchise, while ancient in its origins, is consistently modern in so many surprising respects.   The wigged Revolutionaries who trotted to Philadelphia in 1787 to debate a new Constitution could not have been further from our modern techno-savvy entrepreneurs, but each understood a basic truth that has proven persistently true -- a crowd has a wisdom unto itself, and by putting something to the crowd in a vote, that wisdom can emerge.  We know it now as "crowd sourcing".  Let the people speak.  In politics, this crowd sourcing impluse allows the relevant ideas to rise to the top of the agenda which in the long run is the best way that people's concerns get heard. 

This is all preamble to a blog post about a book on jobs in the new economy, but that will have to wait for my next post.

All Lost in the Supermarket

Days after last week's election, I found myself wandering in Whole Foods feeling like some poor lost soul in Willy Wonka's version of the Garden of Eden, not unlike a bewildered gnome in the Land of Plenty. 

Food stuffs, aisle after aisle of them, were neatly arranged on shelves deep and broad.  The staff, a combination of art history majors and organic gardeners who run their own honey-producing beehives off their Somerville roofs and Ethiopian immigrants who marvel each day at this place called America, are responsive to any box of organic pasta that might be askew but are daunting in the professionalism which they bring to what they care for. 

They are the Guardians to the Platonic Idea we called Food.  Whole Foods after all is a supermarket with a governing philosophy.  

No doubt I was searching for something expensive, but the wide aisles and the sheer amount of stuff around me, and the expense of it, got me thinking -- who is this proverbial angry white male, the voter who chose Scott Brown over Elizabeth Warren, the voter who chose Mitt Romney over Barack Obama, and what the hell does he want?

For my answer, I turned to the cheese aisle.  What would he make of this, I wondered?

What would he make of a hundred different choices of cheese from around the world, all sitting on a refrigerated shelf, just waiting to be chosen?  And what would he make of the people stooping deliberately and dramatically over this array, considering their cheeses like Sherlock Holmes drawing on his pipe, waiting for the insight to arrive through the blue haze of smoke? 

This angry man, would he find this experience an enlightening expansion of his horizons?  Or would he find it ridiculous, frightening, or even threatening -- an example of a world that he neither recognizes nor welcomes?

We have split into two nations in some important ways.  Who walks into a Whole Foods? In Cambridge, we know the type.  We're in the cheese aisle. 

But who doesn't walk into a Whole Foods? Him we don't know, because he's not in the cheese aisle.  When confronted with such opulence, is he coaxed to vent a resentment at an America he's been told is filled with "takers", as Mitt Romney said.  The ultimate private capital billionaire reached out to this voter with a message that was narrow, angry, divisive, hyperbolic.  The GOP continues to maw its cud, as well they should. 

But we dismiss his anger at our own peril.  Like this little gnome trying to decide between a Gorgonzola and a St. Andre, we'd be fools not to see what's around us too.

The 2012 Election and the new (Silent) Majority

The election is over now.  Barack Obama is our president.

Meanwhile the Republicans are eating their young.  The unrepentant among them, and there are many, vie to show the ostrich how to do its work by digging their heads as deep as the sand will let them.  The intelligent among them, and they still exist, try to measure the length of their self-imposed tunnel before they even bother looking for the light.  And the final third of this triumvirate is the real rope around the Republican Party's neck -- the fringe element that controls the party by controlling the primary process for choosing candidates.  This element is frightening, and large, and accounts for the claims that climate change is a hoax and there is such a thing as legitimate rape, both uttered by GOP politicians. As a young woman said today on a radio call-in show: "No thinking person will vote for that, no matter what their governmental philosophy might be."  And that is exactly the point.  No thinking person will vote for that, ever.

Moderate GOP leaders seem blind to the dark shadow this dispossessed angry voter casts over their chances to appeal to 21st century multicultural, inclusive, cooperative America.  Christie Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey GOP governor herself, pointed out that older white fundamentalist Christian males are simply not enough to build an electable party, never mind a governing coalition.  She certainly qualifies as one of the intelligent ones. 

Meanwhile for the rest of us, Election Day was good.  In Massachusetts, long lines of Cambridge voters met poll workers when doors opened at 7AM.  The lines didn't lessen, the voters did not let up, for hours and hours.  There was a massive effort to turn out the vote, to see Elizabeth Warren become the first female Senator from the state.

Her bid to defeat Scott Brown had a deep meaning to many here.  More than just the sting of having a Republican in the seat that had been Ted Kennedy's, there is a sense among liberals that a new majority is coming into being.  It is progressive and Left-leaning, and it votes Democratic.  It is the antithesis to the Nixon Silent Majority of the early 1970s, when disaffected Southern conservative Democrats joined forces with Northern urban working-class Catholics to abandon the Democratic party in droves, over Civil Rights, over Women's Rights, over the Vietnam War.  Ronald Reagan understood this ten years later and expanded it.  With his folksy control of the airwaves, he cloaked the country in the American flag and his brand of conservatism (which seems strikingly tolerant and cooperative compared to today's Republican rhetoric).  Liberals were on the run.  Democrat George McGovern won only Massachusetts in the 1972 presidential election.  Democrat Walter Mondale won only Minnesota in 1984.

But that has changed in large part because the country has changed.  While the South hasn't budged, remaining strongly Republican (at least they are true to that conservative value), the northern urban centers have experienced a true renaissance.  The cloak of their old industrial past has been shed.  They have become the new home of innovation, hipness, finance, information, and strongly Democratic-leaning politics. Even Detroit, a city on the perpetual downturn, is finding small places of upturn in this new century.  For activists, this election had to be an assertion of a new blue majority.  And it was.

At first glance of the electoral map, you might not come to that conclusion with so much red to see. 

In this county-by-county look at the dispersion of Democratic (blue) and Republican (red) votes in 2012, vast swaths of the middle part of the country are Republican, and solidly so.  But of course the population concentrations exist along the coasts.  From Maine down to Washington DC, Democratic.  Bordering the Great Lakes, also Democratic.  The West Coast almost in its full entirety, Democratic.  The exception is in the South, where the coastal counties along Gulf Coast remain Republican.

As it turns out, the blue districts correlate with the economic activity most strongly associated with 21st century America, the America that is still the innovation hub for the world: the Bostons, New Yorks, San Franciscos, Seattles.  These areas share a lot in common -- multicultural, tolerant, high levels of education, high incomes, long histories of immigrant arrivals living in close proximity and high density to the existing populations.

This map speaks of today's America, and it points to the challenge that the Republican Party faces.  The blue areas will not only continue to be blue for the foreseeable future, but they will continue to grow, in population, in economic strength, in wealth and in power.  They will both contribute and be influenced by the globalized work environment that is our new reality and soon to be our new norm.  They prize innovation, inclusion, and cooperation in their ethic.  And they see the Democratic Party not only as reflecting that, but as understanding it and implementing those values in its own work. In this world, in multicultural America, old divisions such as skin color and language of origin lessen in importance, to be replaced by new divisions -- education level, access to capital and information -- presenting a whole new set of thorny challenges. 

Can the Republicans understand this enough to have something relevant to say about it?  I think not in the near future.  Their endless focus on tax cuts seems to betray a lack of deeper comprehension of the complexity of the challenges, and the momentum within the party to travel down bad alleyways that are ultimately dead-ends is too strong to alter nimbly and responsively.  But it is safe to assume that even for Republicans eventually it will not be heresy or punishable by political death to utter the words: science is real and women are equals.  If not, it's the way of the Dodo bird for them.

Let me tell you a story that both you and I know.

This is a review of a book I haven't read.  But in some senses, I have.  And in some senses, so have you.

Yesterday, journalist and Pulitzer-prize winning New York Timesman Timothy Egan talked with Tom Ashbrook on the NPR radio show On Point about his new book Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher.  It's the story of Edward Curtis, who traveled this country in the early part of the 20th century to photograph the disappearing Native American tribes in their still intact cultures. 

Curtis the person I did not know, though some of the photos I had seen before.  Arresting in their composition, black and white, they capture both a moment in time and something more.  A man collecting rushes from the side of his canoe; the portrait of Chief Joseph, called the Indian Napoleon; these I had seen. 

But I know the book for another reason. 

We have much lore in the United States.  Our presidential candidates espouse a good amount of it each election cycle.  Last night's debate was no different. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney know this very well and they know the phrases too, and if they don't, their pollsters do: We are the exceptional nation.  We are the unique nation.  We stand up to tyrants. We lead, we do not follow. 

The importance of these words is clear, and last night, their immediate impact was also clear.  In this hyper-mediated age, CNN kindly ran a focus group, broken out by gender with real-time tracking of responses to the candidates as they talked.  Say something bellicose, men respond favorably, say something moderate, women tend to be more positive.

These phrases originate mostly from our understanding of the meaning of the end of the Second World War and the defeat of fascism and imperialism in Germany and Japan. In the post-war era we demonstrated both deep foresight and great generosity about the systems needed in a much-changed world.  We sat at the top of the global heap, there by our own American ability to climb and by our capacity to unleash an arsenal of democracy, all in the name of an ideal.  Heady stuff!

Much of this national lore still animates us. It certainly reappeared in the 2003 talk of "a march to Baghdad" that sounded more like the march to Paris 60 years before.  Of course, in 2003 there was no champagne or kisses from French girls.  The faulty analogy led to differences too great to even sneer at, and the cost of the error is still being felt.

But there is another national lore as deep in our collective national self, perhaps deeper because it is older, and closer to our American core.  No founding myth can expunge it, indeed no national saga can exist without it.  It is this American truth that Edward Curtis went out and photographed. It is the story of Native Americans, in their native lands and in their native cultures, in those waning days.  Curtis found them and photographed them before that life was made extinct by the full arrival of European-based American culture. 

The story is heart-rending in many ways.  Seattle, the only major North American city named after a Native American, declared it illegal for a Native American to live within the city's limits.  Curtis found the last remaining one and photographed her.  The Comanche, some of the most feared warriors who roamed the Southwest, ended up being forcibly relocated to Oklahoma, and by the time Curtis caught up with them, they all had short hair and were wearing ties.  Any hippie or Old Testament raconteur would recognized the metaphorical Samson-like castration contained in a haircut and the expression of control and of being leashed in the donning of a neck-tie.

Most moving of all were the recordings of the people that Curtis made on wax cylinders, a technique he learned from E.H. Harriman. To hear the sounds of the bear dance recorded in 1910 -- crackly sounds on a primitive technology of an ancient dance -- haunts.  A tribal leader who was wearing a full bear's skin chants a simple, powerful sound that crosses across time.  The dancer was the carrier of a tradition that may have gone back centuries but was soon to die.  We hear it today as if it arrived by capsule from Mars, but it was us. It was America.  It is America.  As much America as any of our other founding tales. 

Let me tell you a story that both you and I know.

The Bridge That Is Also A Place

At its highest point, it is higher than the top of the Transamerica Building in San Francisco.  Its concrete and steel arch effortlessly over the cavernous rock walls and water below.  It catches the warmth of the Southwestern sun beautifully.  It's a modern civil engineering marvel.

It is the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, spanning the Colorado River, connecting Arizona and Nevada, diverting traffic off of the top of the Hoover Dam which sits 1,500 feet to its north.

An elegant solution to a complicated problem.

It does not compete with its sister structure.  Rather it compliments her perfectly.

Honestly, the message seems unecessary

Separated by 80 years, these two paired beauties revive a primal nativist creed in me: America the doer; America the solver; America the ingenious; America the determined; America the skilled; America the brave.

Foreground completed during the Great Depression (1936).  Background, completed during the Great Recession (2010). Public works at their best.

This bridge is a testimonial to an America that has by no means disappeared, one where technical skill, engineering can-do, and a tremendously sensitive aesthetic understanding meld form to function with brawn, delicacy and awareness, creating something that will stand the test of generations.

To the detail, beautiful.

The tragedy of this bridge is that this public works project -- all paid for by the taxpayers of this land, where the states of Nevada and Arizona partnered with the federal government to achieve this major success -- will never be lauded for the victory that it is.  Unlike the Hoover Dam next to it (and temporally before it) or the NASA space program of the 1960s, this massive public effort will not similarly shine in the public's mind, largely due to the toxic (and politically-motivated) cynicism and endless demagoguery which says that government bureaucrats never get anything right.  Here is something that is not only governmental but also exceedingly right -- and far (far) better than the container loads of plastic crap we import daily from China to fulfill our consumerist gluttony courtesy of private sector benevolence and wisdom.

Now that my high horse has grown tired, I can also note that standing on the O'Callaghan-Tillman Bridge, 1000 feet above the gorge below, with two 18-wheelers rolling over it at 60 m.p.h. one feels not so much as a shimmer under foot. 

Where do you want to meet?

This post is really a "what have I been up to lately" post. 

And the answer is: Not blogging, for one.  At least not blogging recently. 

I did go see US Senate Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren face-off against incumbent Republican Scott Brown last night up in Lowell, courtesy of her regional coordinator James Hutchinson who kindly invited me and gave me a ticket. 

Mind if we snap a photo while you wait?

Scott Brown has the ignominious quality of having defeated Angus McQuilken for the state senate seat vacated by Cheryl Jacques about ten years ago now.  It was a sad, unhappy and unfortunate outcome, with the knock-on effect that Scott Brown is now our federal representative.  To be honest, remembering all those years ago, the district was always basically Republican even though Democrat Jacques held onto it for many years.

Fast forward to 2012, and Warren held her own and more last night, through the bogus charges about her Native American heritage, and "whose side was she on" in the asbestos claims.  All lawyers are taught to make a case.  Brown is a crafty pol and a skilled debater.  He's no slouch, and he's reaching for his tar and feathers and brush.  But she's no slouch either, and wisdom is that things are tilting Dem in this state as in many states.  As one pundit said the other day, "the race is hers to lose".  Turn out the vote is all I can urge.  Turn out the damn vote.

But that, for all its inherent interest, is not why I write.  Why I write is that a group I am connected with -- planners and architects (see our website here) -- is about to start a study, using software provided by OpenPlans called ShareAbouts (thank you Ellen McDermott), to map places where people meet.  We've chosen Kendall Square in Cambridge as our target area. Click here to see our map.

Why is this important?  Well, if you're interested in innovation, and who in Cambridge is not interested in innovation, then who you're talking to, and when, and where and how, all become part of the discussion of the likelihood that you'll have a new idea.  It seems crazy, but that may actually be the point.  It is crazy, and that is what makes it worthwhile.

The best description I've heard is that innovation is decontextualization.  Now, that's a very MIT Media Lab way of saying it, but it's a good insight. Taking things out of one context and putting them into another context and seeing what that tells you is perhaps the best way to come to a new idea.  Or maybe it is the most predictable way to come to a new idea.  In any event, hearing what others think is one way to do this.  And the best way to hear what they think is to see them in person, to get the full richness of their person.  All of it very interesting.  Click on those links above to learn more.