WORK LESS Institute of Technology

YOUR POWER IS TURNING OUR DARKNESS TO DAWN

"This country is changing. We had a 58-hour week, a 48-hour week, a 40-hour week. As machines take more and more of the jobs of men, we are going to find the workweek reduced, and we are going to find people wondering what they should do." -- US President John F. Kennedy, September 29, 1963.

A little less than two months before his death on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy spoke at the dedication of the Whiskeytown reservoir in Northern California. His remarks about reducing the workweek were notable because since before his election he had adamantly opposed such a move, which at that time was being vigorously advocated by the AFL-CIO and its president, George Meany.

Listening to the audio of JFK speaking from that dam two months before he was assasinated, the first thought I had was, "now, there's some stirring rhetoric." Second thought I had was, "hey, maybe we can play off those motifs, building the shorter work time connection." So I looked more closely at the text and some of the presuppositions and potential contradictions started to peek back at me. One of the contradictions was the line about "water going to the sea unused." That's a strange concept. The water in a wild river doesn't go to the sea unused. Fish use it, if nothing else. And people use the fish.

So I had a hunch it might be worth a closer look at how the environmental impacts of the Trinity diversion played out. My hunch was correct. It turns out that more water was diverted from the Trinity river than the Bureau of Reclamation had ever authorized. The excess diversion hurt the fish, which hurt the Hoopa Valley and Yurok tribes who traditionally caught and ate those fish. Meanwhile, the diverted water went to agribusiness corporations in the southern Central Valley at massively subsidized, "dirt" cheap prices. Ain't the free enterprise system grand?

A couple of other lines struck me from the Whiskeytown speech. One of them was just the reference to the Grand Coulee Dam, which set me off humming "Roll On, Columbia" to myself. It's a great song and Woody Guthrie was a great songwriter, but that doesn't mean every line of it is necessarily true.

"Your power is turning our darkness to dawn," might be metaphorically true in the luminescent sense of the electrification lighting up homes and factories at night. But there's another metaphor there about the power of public works turning the darkness of the Depression to the dawn of... what? An enduring New Deal social democracy? 'Fraid not. Didn't pan out that way. How about the "dawn" of cold war, the interstate highway system, suburban sprawl, automation, the baby boom, the war in Vietnam, the OPEC oil embargo, Watergate, Samuel Huntington's "excess of democracy", Carter's malaise and utlimately Reagan's Morning in America, Newt Gingrich's Contract with America and Bush's Compassionate Conservatism.

And through all that the turbines continued to turn, pumping out government-subsidized power "to run the great factories and water the land." Somehow the line, To run the great automated, downsized, just-in-time factories and water the agribusiness corporate land, doesn't scan quite so nicely.

Guthrie's reference to the Grand Coulee being "the mightiest thing ever built by a man" reminded me of the photograph on the front cover of a Technocracy pamphlet from the 1930s by M. King Hubbert, Man-Hours and Distribution. The photo was of the giant scroll case of the turbine at the Norris Dam in the Tennessee Valley.

A man is shown, dwarfed by the giant tunnel, carrying a tool, possibly a large pipe wrench, slung over his shoulder. The man is standing toward the background of the photo, facing to the right toward a powerful light that is projecting the man's elongated shadow on the opposite wall of the tunnel.

Maybe that light is the dawn that Woody Guthrie was singing about. Maybe that shadow -- much larger than the man himself -- represents the man-hours of work displaced by the generated power.

M. King Hubbert, by the way, is the guy who predicted "peak oil", first in the US in the 1970s and then for the world, sometime around now. But I won't go into that here. Instead, my train of thought is still following the Depression tracks of Woody's "darkness to dawn" metaphor.

The introductory paragraphs to Hubbert's pamphlet add bit of chiaroscuro to the two-dimensional, on-off switch of the darkness/dawn dichotomy. Hubbert saw the disturbing economic events nevertheless provoking more competent social thinking and the shattering of American folk-lore about the promised reward for hard work and ambition.

Take Woody Guthrie, for instance. He was unemployed and broke in 1941 when the Bonneville Power Authority offered him the princely sum of $266.66 to write a song a day for the soundtrack of a documentary film about the dams on the Columbia River. He wrote 26 songs, so I suppose he got Sundays off. Works out to about ten bucks a song.

For ten bucks a song, it may be petty of me to complain but there's a slightly ambiguous passage in Roll On, Columbia. It concerns who the "we" was that "fought many a fight" on the banks of the river. I had to read those line over several times before satisfying myself that Guthrie's "we" refers to the first nations people defending their territory from Sheridan's imperialist army. I came to that conclusion because "they" logically refers to "Sheridan's boys in the blockhouse... ...who saw us in death but never in flight."

If you don't mind my confessing, I started to cry when I realized that the conquest of the native people by the white settlers and the conquest of the "river's wild flight" by "these mighty men" marks an analogy, not a contrast. And to be consistent, we must identify with the wild mountains and canyons, not with the shiploads of plenty.

But let's get back to JFK, standing on that dam 22 years after Woody Guthrie wrote those songs. He begins by reminiscing about a poem by Stephen Vincent Binet, a poem about American names, "the sharp names that never get fat" and that include the "plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat." So what is a medicine hat? According to the source I found, it's the contrasting coloured markings on the top of the head of a horse, including one or both ears, making them look like they're wearing a hat. "Many Native Americans believed horses and ponies having this color marking to be sacred or having special powers. Due to this belief by Native Americans during the Indian Wars many of the horses and ponies bearing this marking were killed by soldiers." Seems to be some kind of a common theme developing here.

"[The Trinity diversion] will show that man can improve on nature..."

JFK's false dichotomy between man and nature is a tempting but elusive target. But even conceding him the poetic license, one must add the caveat that such improvements on nature can have unforeseen consequences that turn out to be the opposite of improvements. I don't know what the balance sheet is on the Whiskeytown reservoir and the Trinity diversion. Are the crops blooming in the former desert around Fresno fertilized and protected with pesticides made from petrocarbons, as well as being irrigated with water diverted from salmon habitat? Because the water's so cheap, do the crops get over-irrigated so that the pesticides leach down into the water table?

And, admitting that the building of dams did indeed bring shiploads of plenty, have those shiploads been used wisely, as JFK suggested in closing they would: to conserve natural resources and develop and improve them; to fulfill responsibilities to ourselves and those who depend upon us; and to make the land better both now and in the long future?

Posted by sandwichman at December 2, 2004 07:58 PM