A Brief History…

Victor Davis Hanson has a piece today on his observations on the recession. The comments are as good as the essay, itself.

This week I drove on I-5, the 99, and 101. Except for a few stretches through San Jose to Palo Alto, most of the freeways were unchanged in the last 40 years. The California Water Project of the 1960s hasn’t been improved — indeed, it has been curtailed. My local high school looks about the same as it did in 1971. The roads in rural California are in worse condition than forty years ago.

Private houses are, of course, larger and more opulent. But the state seems not to be investing in infrastructure as before, but more in consumption and redistribution. For all the mega-deficits out here, we are not going broke building upon and improving the material world we inherited. The drive from Selma to Palo Alto is identical to the one I made in 1975 — no quicker, not really safer. The comfort and increased safety come from improved cars (seat belts, air bags, better structures), not from government’s efforts to make super freeways and new routes.

I have made this observation for some time. I came to California in 1956 to go to college. I had a very modest scholarship and very little money but I managed fairly well except for the lack of a car. I was struck by several things in my first impressions of California. The highways were the best I had ever seen. At the time, the Harbor Freeway ended at Century Boulevard and the Santa Ana Freeway ended at 17th street. There was no 405 and the Hollywood Freeway ended at Lankersheim Boulevard. I can’t remember if there was any of the San Bernardino Freeway built yet. I don’t think so. The downtown interchange was called the “fourway” because the Harbor connected with the Pasadena and the Hollywood connected with the Santa Ana. Construction continued under Pat Brown until the present configuration was largely complete. Then came Jerry Brown and construction stopped. We were supposed to learn that “Small is beautiful” and the decline of California began there. Now, he is running for Governor again. God help us !

Here follows some other unscientific observations. This is a funny recession. My grandfather’s stories of the Great Depression — 27 relatives in my current farmhouse and barn — were elemental: trying to find enough food to survive, and saving gasoline by shifting to neutral and gliding to stops or on the downhill.

My parents did better than this but my grandparents had a farm and my father had various jobs in Chicago. My mother lived with her sister and brother-in-law (who is my male hero). He sheltered many members of his wife’s family in a big house and supported them all with his job as a master bricklayer in a steel mill. His father had been superintendent of bricklayers in that mill before him. The mill is now closed. My mother worked in a warehouse, technically as a secretary but she had a more responsible job, until she was married and then, after I was in the 8th grade and my sister in the 5th, she went back to work. She did not like to ask my father for money. She worked until she was 77 years old when the company told her she would have to retire as no one knew how old she was and they would have trouble with their insurance if someone was over 65 and working. During the Depression, she also worked as a legal secretary and could type 120 words per minute. I could dictate my high school papers to her at normal conversational speed. She told us that she was subject to income tax but the amount was so small that her employer paid it as a fringe benefit.

The problem I saw this week was rampant obesity, across all age and class lines. If anything, the wealthier in Palo Alto/Stanford eat less (yes, I know the liberal critique that they have capital and education to shop for expensive healthier fruits and vegetables while the poor and neglected must turn to fast food, coke, and pop tarts). No matter — a lot of Americans are eating too much and moving too infrequently — and no one, at least if girth matters, is starving.

My mother walked to work from the train terminus every morning, a distance of about a mile. My father could carry a juke box (his business in the 1940s) up a flight of stairs on his back. He was the strongest man I ever saw. He owned a music company with a partner and he had a story that might have been a joke. They had a pair of piano movers that worked for them. The two consisted of an enormous Pole and a skinny little Indian. The Indian was the man at the bottom carrying the piano up a flight of stairs.

There is a new beggar. I see him on the intersections now on major urban boulevards. They are never illegal aliens, rarely African-Americans, but almost all white males, and of two sorts. One is someone who looks homeless, not crippled but in a walker or wheelchair (yet he gets up occasionally). He has a sign on cardboard with a wrenching narrative (fill in the blanks: veteran, of course; disabled; will work (not) for food, etc.). Choice corners become almost enclaves, as two or three cluster on islands and stoplights, as if certain franchises are choice and more lucrative than others.

I’ve seen a lot of homeless-looking white beggars and quite a few black beggars at freeway off-ramps where there is a stoplight. I haven’t seen the affluent looking ones he mentions but Orange County might be less tolerant of them than Palo Alto. I have listened to conversations in the market. Two very attractive women in their late 30s were talking near me in the meat department. One said “Well, we’re still paying our bills.” There was an open house last weekend, a block from me, that had a sign “bank owned.” I wonder how many others there are in this area. It was the largest model of the style of homes in this neighborhood.

I confess this week to have listened in on many conversations in Palo Alto and at Stanford, read local newspapers, and simply watched people. So I am as worried about the elite upscale yuppie as the poor illegal alien. The former have lost almost all connection with physical labor, the physical world, or the ordeal that civilization endures to elevate us from the savagery of nature.

While many were fit, and seem to work out, bike, ski, and hike, none understood the mechanics that lie beneath the veneer of the good life — the chain-sawing, hammering, drain-unplugging, tractor-driving, irrigating, and welding that allows a pleasant afternoon Greek salad and cappuccino on University Avenue — the disconnect between those Pennsylvania “clingers” and Obama’s arugula-eating crowd.

I have worried about this quite a bit. It goes back a ways. When I applied for a surgical residency, only one professor asked me about whether I used tools or played a musical instrument. That was 40 years ago. I have always had tools around and have made them available to my children. One son has gotten into the use of tools and has borrowed many of mine but I don’t mind. He has a family and a house to maintain. The whole culture of tools is important to me. One of Hanson’s commenters said it well.

This passage reminds me of a book I recently read on the Internet Archive : Mind and hand : manual training, the chief factor in education by Charles Ham. Categorized as a vocational text but it is actually promoting the inclusion of manual training as part of the intellectual development of students. The author does a survey from Egypt to 19th century America discussing how as civilizations became separated from manual labor they have declined. I really recommend chapter 2 on the Majesty of Tools. The guy really raises tools to a higher level. But the curious item is, if you ignore that the author mentions nothing after 1899, it could be discussing today’s society.

For if man without tools is nothing, to be unable to use tools is to be destitute of power; and if with tools he is all, to be able to use tools is to be all-powerful. And this power in the concrete, the power to do some useful thing for man—this is the last analysis of educational truth.

We are now governed by a generation of talkers. They do nothing but talk and, worse, believe that talk will solve problems, even with enemies. Reading and talking are important as it is the way we learn but there are many things that cannot be accomplished except by getting hands dirty. Sometimes that is a metaphor. I didn’t get my hands dirty in surgery but I often came home drenched in blood or had to shower and wash out my underwear after a big trauma case. Not all of life fits between the pages of a book.

Tags: economics, education

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