Warp & Woof

v.1.3

Welcome to Warp & Woof, a blog from William Sundwick. Its purpose is to share with its readers some ways to navigate the philosophical, moral and aesthetic dimensions of life.

It is not a scholarly blog, but the author hopes that his own life experience and reading can inform his readers’ journeys through such realms.

He wants to share some things that he believes matter, not “fake news,” and he will offer frequent enough doses to motivate you to keep checking in. Comments are welcome. While Blogger requires you to identify yourself via your email address, the author will anonymize any comments before publishing them.

Warp & Woof has a structure. There are five departments of thinking (pages) -- but some entries may be cross-posted in more than one department. These five “realms of deliberation” are:

The Present

    … what matters, for sure!

 

                     The Past

                              … what used to matter       

                                                               

                                                                              

                                             The Future

                                                      … what may matter, who knows?

 

                             Totems

                                    … objects that matter (or mattered)  

                        

Beats

    … sounds that matter, since we never get tired of hearing them! 

Author’s Introduction

Switching to the first person now and translating -- readers can expect entries dealing with health and wellness for seniors (that’s me) in The Present, along with musings on bigger psychological/philosophical issues. This includes a fair dose of writing on child development (I spend some time babysitting my grandchildren).  

The Past will be filled with lots of hopefully knowledgeable meanderings around politics, sociology and history. I’m a liberal arts type, undergraduate major in history, and professional librarian for something like 30 years before imperceptibly transitioning to IT professional. I retired from the Library of Congress in 2015, after 42 years at that institution. History and politics are very big topics for me, despite their vague and uncertain impact on the present or future.

Exciting (to me) developments in science and technology will be found in The Future, along with a healthy dose of fear about things like global warming and other planetary or civilizational catastrophe! Perhaps I have an apocalyptic frame of reference -- most of my thinking about economics and anthropology belongs in The Future. Economics covers consumer behavior and marketing, both interesting fields for me. Anthropology deals with primitive roots of tribal life, which I claim will become more apparent in the future, as more complex social arrangements break down, putting sociology in The Past. The Future is not the place for invective about the status of American politics -- that belongs on the page for The Past!

On the page for Totems, you will find lots of apparently senseless, but exciting for me, information about cars, past, present, and future. I’m a “car guy”, by virtue mostly of my upbringing as a General Motors brat in Flint, Michigan during the fifties and sixties. I’m not a car guy mechanic, however. I never open the hood or crawl under my own vehicle (much less anybody else’s!), but a car guy who was raised in, and by, mid-century American “car culture.”

Finally, on the Beats page, another personal obsession gets its due: rock music, from the origins in the Great Migration, through the British Invasion, hard blues, acid rock, punk, metal, techno. If anybody thinks these genres are still alive, please let me know! I’ve “got my ear down to the ground” to paraphrase Jim Morrison, When the Music’s Over. Yes, there is audio here, via YouTube videos.

That’s been the concept. Version 1.0 of Warp & Woof launched on Ground Hog Day, 2017.  I made some changes to the layout and design recently, for v.1.2 (sounds better than v.1.1).  And, true confessions, this v.1.3 is informed by two-and-a-half years in my Arlington, VA Writers Group. These folks may be my only audience – except when I beg my Facebook friends and relatives to read my posts. I hope my mission statement remains unchanged at least through version 2.0; i.e., helping my readers see the “big picture” more clearly, making the complex simple, and having fun while we expand both our peripheral vision and depth perception!                      

         

Me, at Filene Center, Wolf Trap, 2018

                                                        

Car Buying: The Experience

William Sundwick

For a life-long car buff like me, shopping for a new car has been an exciting, intensely pleasurable, experience. Cars are fascinating to me: their design, their features, their engineering. I grew up with the industry, and I’ve followed the automotive press intermittently ever since.

My latest experience was no exception. My Excel workbook of all possible competitors compared not only numeric specs, but capsule summaries taken from reviews and road tests. The process lasted two years – my spreadsheet had tabs for 2017 models, 2018 models, and 2019 models. I didn’t pull the trigger in either of the first two model years I tracked. In 2017, I merely collected data on all possible popular-priced SUV/Crossovers. For 2018, I devised elimination thresholds based on certain specs. This, combined with a comprehensive tour of the 2018 Washington Auto Show, allowed a hypothetical emergence of an “elite eight,” then “final four” contenders (roughly on time for the 2018 NCAA basketball tournament).

But I didn’t buy a car. Rinse and repeat for 2019 models. For this model year, I could only reduce to five finalists – I had tightened my elimination standards, but there were simply more cars that met those requirements.

Test drives at dealers finally became a reality this August. Dealers were ramping up their summer clearances, seeking to clear out inventory for the coming model year. They wanted my business. Five contenders quickly became four after a disconcerting phone call to a Nissan dealer where the salesman conceded: “nobody stocks Rogue Hybrids -- they don’t sell!” – the Rogue Hybrid was only model that made Nissan one of the five finalists. “Thank you, I guess I can cross Nissan off my list!” Four different test drives ensued. VW Tiguan was eliminated after a decisive spin – too big, ungainly, slow. A slight delay before following up with the remaining three choices found both my wife and me getting bored with the process. Eager to reach a decision, we arbitrarily crossed Ford Escape off our list: “It is due to be replaced for 2020 with an all-new model,” I reminded my wife. “And Consumer Reports rates its ‘expected reliability’ as low,” granted a statistical assumption. That left a titanic duel between Subaru Forester and Honda CR-V.

We went together to other Subaru and Honda dealers, searching for the one thing that might be key to a final decision. This was somewhat painful until my wife took the wheel of both contenders. Even though she had insisted throughout the test drive process that this would be my car, not hers, the final word belonged to her! The Honda felt more “familiar” – coinciding with my own feeling that it was more “straight-forward” (less “gimmicky”) than the Subaru. And there were no minuses with the Honda, except that it didn’t include a heated steering wheel in the price (a $500 accessory, we later discovered).

The decision was made! Now came the hard part. Where would we buy my Honda? And, how to avoid being taken for a ride by that dealer? Further Internet research followed.

All dealers publish their inventories online. While it is possible for them to trade cars to make a sale, I found that such practices work against the best price – seems reasonable, especially in this annual inventory reduction environment. All dealers may not have equally well-managed stocks of cars. They do compete after all. In our case, a larger inventory worked to our advantage.

With some insight provided by Edmunds.com, I decided the best approach was to email blast all local Honda dealers with my requirements and wait for the best quote for an “Internet price” to come in response. The Edmunds site provided the interface for my blast. The response came same day -- from the dealer which had claimed, when we visited, to be the largest in Northern Virginia (Ourisman Honda of Tysons Corner). The test drive there had been pleasant enough. The salesman said he remembered us from five years previous when we were last car shopping – and, we didn’t even buy from him! It’s possible he could have done advance research on us, since I made the appointment with another sales associate – I didn’t remember him. “What did you buy five years ago, you were looking at a Civic Hybrid?” he offered unprompted. (Winner then, a Chevy Volt!)

One of the best qualities in a car salesman is the ability to put the customer at ease, with personal anecdotes, less-than-perfect knowledge, and general easy-going demeanor. This salesman possessed all these skills. He had some knowledge of features he could demonstrate – hands-free tailgate, remote starting with key fob, personalized settings for almost everything in car. He continued his presentation, even after we announced we were ready to buy his car.

He did, however, gloss over a problem we had with our “Internet price” quote: the fine print said “dealer financing required” – we expected to pay cash! Since Virginia doesn’t allow pre-payment penalties for financing, we all agreed that the “dealer financing” requirement was a mere formality. We could pay it off with only one additional small payment – our salesman insisted. But that was before he went to his sales manager to seal the deal.

Hard-nosed negotiation commenced. Finally, a concession from the sales manager: “I’ll give you two free oil changes if you agree to make at least three payments.” And only the oil changes were in writing! He seemed so pathetic in his desperation to make a small amount in interest for his bank! Margins must be very tight in this business. The law was on our side. He can’t force us to pay interest!

And, he wanted to sell us a car.

Driving away from the dealership in my new Honda gave me a sense of accomplishment. I’m not sure I’ll bother with the two free oil changes, anyway. I still needed to arrange for the towing of our old car, to be donated to Vehicles for Change, as we have for the last two cars we’ve replaced. The satellite radio needed to be registered (first 90 days free), presets set, old car’s radio deactivated. I needed to read the manual cover-to-cover. Fortunately, Honda also provides a website with a collection of videos on how the car’s controls work (the manual is not especially comprehensive or well-written). 

Driving is the best way to learn about the car. And that is what I’ve been doing for the last few weeks. Its HondaLink navigation system now knows where I live!

City Cousins and Country Cousins

What Makes Them Different?

William Sundwick

The Neolithic Revolution occurred approximately 12.500 years ago. It was followed immediately by the urban/rural political divide. As soon as hunter-gatherers coalesced into agricultural settlements, and stopped being nomadic, they established villages, then cities. Yet, the food to feed the population in those cities was grown by the farmers. It was their surplus that sustained the city.

In time, however, the farmers’ natural advantage over the city dwellers became inverted. Farmers became indentured to the lords of the manor (the “city”) under feudalism. Power flowed upward – the cities became creditors and the manor, or vassals, were debtors.

The eternal conflict between debtors and creditors intensified. Mercantilism was about more than international trade. Any power center (e.g., an estate, corporation, or nation) sought to maximize profit by keeping costs (imports) to a minimum while getting maximum price for its products (exports).

As agricultural workers lost their bargaining power, since they had only one buyer (the city), workers in the city found more favorable economic conditions. If they could produce goods and services only a few skilled individuals could provide, like luxury goods for the nobility, they could demand whatever price they wanted, provided there was a market.

The activities of marketing and money lending became concentrated in cities. Other rent-seeking economic behavior followed. And, the emigration from the countryside to the cities began. That’s where the jobs were. Industrialization only aggravated this. Education also became available mostly in the city – to provide the skills necessary for even more specialized production. Capital, both human and material, became the currency of a new age.

But the farmers stayed the same. Indeed, they found they also needed access to capital in order to maximize their surplus. Family farms became businesses -- or sold out to businesses.

And, the emigration of the young to the city continued. The cities began to grow outside of their previous boundaries – they spawned suburbs! So, even the land area devoted to farming shrunk.

This happened throughout the developed world as, first industrialization, then cosmopolitanism with its diverse poly-cultural richness and higher educational levels, drew ever larger populations, magnetically, to urban areas.

But what about those who either couldn’t or wouldn’t leave? The old, the less educated, the poor. Might they not be resentful of all their talented youth abandoning their traditional way of life for the city? In the United States, and some research indicates in Europe as well, there has now developed a political ideology around the “forgotten ones” status. It often takes on racial animus, “us” (white people) versus “them” (immigrants and non-white others). Religious affiliations can exacerbate the feelings – provincialism and tribalism are frequently promoted by religious denominations. Only some of us are God’s chosen, and fewer of us live in cities.

And those suburbs? That’s where city cousins and country cousins can be neighbors! Suburban development is not unique to the United States. European cities have their own suburbs, with similar characteristics. There are poly-cultural, cosmopolitan suburban communities and multi-cultural communities which experience tension between their constituent cultures. Relatively few suburbs are mono-cultural like small towns or rural areas (very wealthy suburbs may be the exception).

Political sensibilities in the poly-cultural suburbs tend to skew left, or liberal, but multi-cultural communities with their tensions might exaggerate political allegiances across the cultural divide. Sometimes multi-cultural tension is not racial, but class based. It could be between “old-timers” who have been there since the community was a mono-cultural small town and the “newcomers” who have moved there from the city, perhaps victims of gentrification in the city center, or to raise a family in more space.

In the United States today, we are currently engaged in a discussion about the urban/rural divide as it relates to legislative districting. There are severe constitutional constraints on how apportionment is handled from state to state. Recently, the Supreme Court decided federal courts must stay away from partisan redistricting. But the fact remains: if state legislatures decide on the boundaries of the districts, they will always draw the maps so that the dominant party’s position is perpetuated, if they are able. Individual states may come up with alternatives (perhaps even proportional representation), but not all have constitutional provisions for ballot initiatives.

Unless you can make a convincing economic case to farmers and small town mono-cultural voters that their life is made much better by immigrants or free trade, it’s not likely that the present contour of rural right-populism can be replaced any time soon by a more urban poly-culturalism. Some folks simply prefer to live around fewer people, and more empty land. They skew conservative in their values.

Cosmopolitanism is seen by many country cousins as the ideology of the elites – for the winners in society, not them! Likewise, many poorer urban residents see rural provincialism as a strategy for protecting what’s theirs from “theft” by non-whites, especially. Perhaps heightened awareness of their privilege might be prudent for both city cousins and country cousins in this debate.

The Center Cannot Hold

A Primer for 21^st Century Political Labels

William Sundwick

Left and Right. It all started in 1789 with Louis XVI and his National Assembly. The body was reaction to the revolution that year, and the storming of the Bastille. The king knew he had to listen to people with differing views. The deputies supporting crown and church found themselves sitting together to the right of the Assembly President. Those who supported the revolution on the opposite side of the chamber, left of the President. The framework of this seating arrangement held in the Legislative Assembly of 1791, despite all new deputies.

The press picked up on the seating arrangement quickly. Soon everybody was talking about Le Droit and La Gauche in all discussions about the future direction of the monarchy. The coup d’etat of 1792, and the Terror following, emptied the right side of the chamber, when the Girondins , the more moderate of the Jacobins, were purged.  Survivors from that side moved closer to the Montagnards on the Left, but not quite with them, sitting closer to the Center of the chamber. That Center grew during the Thermador period (1794-95) and after the restoration of the monarchy in 1814-15.

Political clubs, then formal parties, emerged as the century progressed, over the objections of monarchists. A similar process had been underway in Britain since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, where Parliament emerged triumphant and immediately began to differentiate itself between “constitutionalism” and “divine right.” The Glorious Revolution also introduced another social and political philosophy into European history – liberalism. Inspired by John Locke, it established the notion of a “social contract” between the people and their ruler. Liberalism has remained the dominant philosophy for most western European governments, the United States and South America ever since.

In 19^th century America, however, a unique political structure developed. Slavery, and the compromises it necessitated, from the Constitutional Convention onward, made European political labels on any Left-Right spectrum difficult to apply. Our political structure has been charitably identified as “American Exceptionalism.” It reduced to two big themes: 1) slavery; and, 2) the frontier. Neither was an issue in Europe. Ending slavery required a violent Civil War, which only replaced it with the demi-slavery of Jim Crow and white supremacy. And, the existence of an empty frontier throughout the century made escape from political labels too easy! Our compromised political system might be described as “centrist,” accommodating both white supremacy and the liberal ideal of self-determination.

Liberalism in the United States became associated more with property rights than social equity. Abolitionists were not liberals, but radicals. In Europe, Marx and Engels created a Left for the industrial revolution, but wrote a series of articles for the New York Tribune before the Civil War where they identify a peculiar American strain of class conflict, literally between slaves and their masters.

Since the frontier was rural – not urban industrial – it was naturally attractive to the aspiring “petty bourgeois” of independent farmers and artisans. That was not the milieu of Britain’s growing textile industry, familiar to Engels, where workers controlling the means of production would lead to “socialism.” The struggle for socialism  would adopt a more European complexion. Not American.

Yet, by the end of the century, America had managed to create a movement of rural “populists,” who later joined with urban workers in a “progressive” coalition led by disaffected members of an elite capitalist class (William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert LaFollette). Progressivism expanded the liberal idea of property rights to workers, perhaps not in Marx’s terms of “seizing the means of production,” but still making great strides toward establishing “social rights.” From the Civil War through the first two decades of the 20^th century, it was the progressive Republican Party, more than Eugene Debs’ socialists, that spearheaded the closest approximation to left politics the country had known up until that time. Progressivism’s purpose was clearly to save capitalism, not destroy it. Likewise, FDR’s New Deal.

American political labels began including the term “conservative” in the mid-20^th century. While certain cultural drivers had always existed in the U.S., as in Europe, toward traditionalism, primacy of property rights, and religious freedom, people who felt these drivers most strongly still found themselves in the broader European liberal tradition -- until that conservative brand was invented by William F. Buckley and others. Robert Taft emerged as the Republican Party symbol of conservatism, not Dwight Eisenhower (a military man averse to political labels and perhaps still tied to the midwestern populists, or progressive wing of his party).

This spiffy new brand of conservatism captured the imagination (and wallets) of media influencers, including television, convincing people that Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was defending our democracy against an insidious plot of Soviet Communism. McCarthy was a Taft Republican who exploited the fears many average Americans held for the “other.” Communists made a convenient other. Richard Nixon was a McCarthy acolyte, and Ronald Reagan gave the hysteria some slick Hollywood PR.

The hysteria faded but still left a mark on political labels. There had never been a strong identification with socialism, or anything smacking of the Left, in U.S. politics. Even labor unions eschewed the label. We remained a Centrist nation as McCarthy and, later, the John Birch Society, were discredited. More people began to see some value in the concept of “social rights” – now expressed as “civil rights.” It was the new face of liberalism. John F. Kennedy was elected, then Lyndon Johnson.

But, alas, American political compromise with the Right was still necessary. Just as it had been with slavery from the birth of the Republic.  The cultural divide between regions, between urban and rural, between religious and secular, could not be eradicated. “Socialist” remained a nasty word. It was popularly associated with communism. You could safely call yourself only “liberal” or “Democrat,” never socialist, in public. We were still a Centrist nation.

Even after Nixon’s humiliation and resignation, we merely advanced to Reagan. Jimmy Carter campaigned in 1976 from the center. Bill Clinton and his Third Way responded to Reaganism by stripping the Democratic Party of any vestiges of social rights. After two terms of Barack Obama, one might think it was time for the Party to feel more comfortable moving left. Apparently not. Donald Trump managed to squeak out an electoral college win over Hillary Clinton in 2016. And, now everybody on the putative political left is convinced that Obama could have done more, save for the country remaining “moderate” – i.e., Centrist. Sigh.

The ”establishment” in the Democratic Party, which includes Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is now identified as “neoliberal”– meaning, generally, that they believe in capitalism and the primacy of markets. They are not socialists. ONLY Bernie Sanders claims that label. And, we all know he will never be president.

We live in a shrinking “flat” world. Yes, it is governed by neoliberal capitalist interests. Those of us who want to change that must accept the widest possible spread from left to right of center in that chamber where we all sit. Imagine it is Paris, 1789. Parties have not been established. We all have our opinions, and we should understand where they come from. We should own them. Left, Right, and Center all have their place in our National Assembly. Even if the Center, changing its positions over time, always holds in the end!