One hundred years ago the headline on the front page of The Tacomo Times read GIRLS TRAPPED IN FIRE DIE IN AGONY. On the previous day (November 1, 1911) a fire had flashed through one of the rooms at the Imperial Powder company in Chehalis Washington. The company supplied explosives to coal mines and the eight women (aged from 14 to 20) who died were working in the mixing room. According to newspapers accounts at the time the fire started In some unexplained manner and ignited the uncovered powder which lay on the long counters of the mixing room. Seven of them died where they stood. One lived long enough to be taken to a hospital where she died a few hours later. A ninth body was reportedly found–so burned that even its gender could not be identified. From the description of the incident it seems that something, perhaps a spark, ignited the powder that lay on every surface and filled the air in the room. The room was, in a instant filled with noxious and fiery gasses. The women, working in a small area between the counters and the wall, had no hope of escaping the conflagration.

The state of Washington had passed laws regulating workplace conditions earlier in the year but they were apparently honoured more in the breach than the observance. And indeed in the initial report of this horror the official statements promised A strict investigation will be held by Coroner Sticklln. How strict, detailed and exhaustive was the investigation? Two days later one can read the following headline on the front page of The Tacoma Times: COMPANY IS EXONERATED. In the two paragraphs below the reader would learn, that the coroner\’s jury last night returned a verdict completely exonerating the company, although it was admitted that the cause of the fire was unknown. And so eight women were buried, six in a shared grave, and no one was to blame for the fire. One hundred years later a monument, paid for by donations of time and money, was finally raised over the graves.

After public outrage in response to the ease with which any responsibility for the deaths was evaded the company was findd less than two thousand dollars (for hiring underaged workers) and the powder making companies of the state were ordered to pay the families of the dead woman just under a thousand dollars for each victim. Dupont Powder\’s balked at paying any part of the fine since it would be, in effect, underwriting one of their competitors.

This is what the work places of America looked like without unions and government regulations. Take care that such conditions do not yet again become the accepted \”cost\” of having a job.

Fringe is one of my favourite television shows right now. It does require that one willfully suspend much of what one knows about science but for much of the time do can do so at least until the episode in question is over. The other night, however, while rewatching an episode from the second season (Episode 217, Olivia in the Lab With a Revolver) one particular line of dialogue stood out to me. Walter Bishop is engaged in doing one his favourites things: dissecting a corpse. Are you familiar with the Chinese notion of Ch\’i? he asks Agent Dunham. After back and forth repartee with his son he goes on to further explain how this relates the current corpse on the table, The Chinese believe that all living creatures contain an energy, or Ch\’i, and, that with proper training, a simple touch can affect their Ch\’i..

Just think about what the writers of the show have to presume/think/know about the audiences of the show in order for that statement to \’work\’ for even a short period of time. It requires that the Chinese be seen as a monolithic \”other.\” Walter does not say \”many Chinese\” or \”most Chinese\” he says the Chinese. As if each and every person in the People\’s Republic (of whom there are more than 1.3 billion) believes the same things. Even if we have never met someone from the PRC personally, even if we believe that, unlike almost every other culture we know of, all Chinese within a particular subculture will believe exactly the same things in the same ways–a little research demonstrates that there are subcultures/groups in the PRC who would be unlikely to believe in Ch\’i. Consider, a) the PRC of officially atheist, b) that at least 1% of the population is Muslim (1% of 1.3 billion is a lot of people), c) that at least 2% of the population is Christian (again, 2% of 1.3 billion is a lot of people), d) that although some of the Muslims and Christians in the PRC may cling to some aspects of earlier Chinese beliefs some significant percentage of them are willing to risk death in order to adhere to their new belief systems.

Consider what it says about the intended audience of Fringe (and other popular television shows) that characters can make comments about the Chinese without the writers/producers/showrunners fearing a massive backlash against the ignorant and prejudiced statements being spewed by characters we are supposed to find sympathetic and loveable.

Just saying……

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

While glancing through the inside pages of some newspapers published a year ago today I couldn\’t help but notice how the \”race\” of the people in the news was marked. One sees the descriptor \”colored\” after many a name but seldom reads the descriptor \”white.\” This may have been one of the reasons why it seemed \”objectively true\” to people that African-Americans were disproportionately likely to be criminals–after all, you might imagine someone explaining, \”every time I read about crime or court cases story after story is about a colored man or woman\” [NOTE: Unfortunately the word that many a white American would have though in their head was far more offensive than \’colored\’ but I am not willing, even for the sake of exploring the internal self-justifications of the white American in 1911, to type it here]

Clearly the \”default\” human being in the mind of the writers (and most of the readers) was white. Certainly the default \’professional,\’ \’high achieving,\’ \’socially prominent,\’ or \’holder of political office\’ was white. Depending on the context and content of the article that white person was also usually a man. Since African-Americans had restricted opportunities in the American of 1911 and since most \”white\” newspapers gave limited coverage to the successes of African-Americans the reader reads only of \”presumably\” white people excelling and carefully marked \”not white\” people committing crimes.

Look, for example, at page 5 The Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA: Oct. 31, 1911). The only instance on that page of a person being specifically identified as white was the story of the young woman who was released (and indeed given a ticket to her desired destination) after having been taken into custody when she suffered a memory lapse while riding on public transportation. The detail of her race explains why she was \”given her freedom,\” as the article put it, with such care and consideration. As we look at the rest of that page we read about:

• Jack Meyers, the young North Carolinian
• Thomas Williams, a prominent druggist
• James Easley. colored
• Mary Shaw, colored
• Charles Murray, colored, of Caroline county. a student (who was found overcome by gas in his hotel room by a porter)
• George Robinson, colored, (who was kicked by one of the horses in the engine company)
• David Johnson, colored (struck under the eye by a stone while working)
• Daniel Tlmberlake, colored

The writers/editor use \’colored\’ where they would, for a white man, use a racially neutral descriptor, as in the case of Meyers and Williams. In one particular instance one can see how clearly that use and non-use of the racial descriptor indicates that the default presumption is \”white:\”

• The hearing of William Brautigan, charged with pouring gasoline on Marshall Washington, colored

White the default is \”white\” the reader is not thinking, consciously, as they read each name, \”Jack Meyers, white\” or, more to the point \”William Brautigan, white\” and therefore falls easily into the misconception that the criminal class is overwhelming African-American.

How typical is this \”marking\” of African-Americans in American newspapers of the time? It is not strange to see it in a newspaper aimed at the white, middle-class of the one-time capital of the Confederate States of America but would one see it elsewhere? I turned to The Washington Times (District of Columbia, Oct. 31, 1911) to find the same phenomenon on the front page:

• John Clark, colored, and his wife, Lilly, were held for action of the grand jury
• For the assault she committed on her teacher In the National Training School, a colored Institution for missionarles and religious workers, Hannah Crawford, colored, was sentenced to serve six months

There were other stories about crime on that page but in no instance was the person charged with the crime, or suspected of having committed a crime, identified as \”white.\” And, as the quotes above indicate, institutions and places, as well as people, were marked as \”colored\” as for example, the Plymouth Congregational Church, colored, Seventeenth and P streets northwest, will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary. [The Washington Times (District of Columbia, Oct. 31, 1911), page 4.] As was the case in The Times-Dispatch the one area of paper in which the descriptor \”white\” was used frequently was the \”Help Wanted\” columns.

Of course, in many ways Washington D. C. was culturally a southern city. Some of the differences in the level and type of racial prejudice in different areas of the country can be seen looking at a number of articles in The Sun (New York) of the same day. Instead of referring to African-Americans as \”colored\” in The Sun they are described as \”negro.\” In the page 5 story THEATRE BARRED A NEGRO And latter Causes Arrest of Lyric\’s Treasurer–A Test Case the reader learns that Baldwin, the African-American gentleman in question, had bought orchestra tickets to a performance only to have to be told that he and his guest could not be seated in the orchestra area. Indeed they were told that no New York theatre would seat them in the orchestra area because it would ruin the business. They were offered balcony tickets but Baldwin chose to press charges against the theatre manager.

While that story offers some hope (after all Baldwin was not attacked and was able to press charges) it also casts a bright light on the attitudes of theatre-going New Yorkers. There were enough of them who refused to be seated in an area that also seated African-Americans that theatres routinely practiced de facto, if not de jure, segregation.

Elsewhere in the newspaper stories routinely report that people are negro but never that people are white, for example: a Polish farmer and a Polish farmhand who does not speak English were fatally beaten by two negro [again, page 5.]

From reading the newspapers from the different areas one senses that there was less legal collusion with racial prejudice in some areas than others and that violence was used less often to support racial inequities in some areas than others. One senses that for all the appearance of a \”friendlier\” form of prejudice in one area than another the violence necessary to support and maintain the existing system was lying close to the surface ready to erupt if every the system was challenged.

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

One hundred years ago the lead story in The Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA) was the death of Joseph Pulitzer. The story of the newspaper magnate\’s climb from penniless immigrant to wealth and influence covered much of the front page of that (and many other) newspapers. As I reading about Pulitizer a much smaller headline near the bottom of the front page catch my eye: MOB SEEKS FUGITIVE: Negro Was Captured and Confessed, but Made His Escape. [Note: All headlines in this series retain the original rather idiosyncratic capitalizations.] According to this story, dateline Washington, GA, Walker had been \”arrested\” for the shooting of C. S. Hollenshead (one of the town merchants), had confessed, had been taken away from the sheriff and his deputy on the public square and had escaped from the crowd that had taken him. The latest word was that he was being hunted in Wilkes county by several hundred men with dogs. If the mob located him, a lynching is certain the reader is told.

As is true in so many of these stories of lynchings, it is clear that the local officers of the law put up at most token resistance to the vigilantes. What was less clear, from the limited details in this article, was how the man managed to escape from the crowd that had seized him. A search of other newspapers yielded slightly more information and details that made the incident even more disturbing. The headline in The Sun (Oct. 20 1911, New York) reads WHISKEY SPOILS A LYNCHING: Members of Mob Too Drunk lo Pull Negro Up After Hope Was Around His Neck and provides more background. No one witnessed the shooting of Hollenshead, suspicion fell on Walker because his wife \”had trouble\” with the dead man. Walker was brought into town in at 2:30 in the morning after being arrested and there just happened to be a crowd of approximately fifty men in the public square just in the right place to intercept the sheriff, his deputy and Walker on the way to the jail. The confession, if there was one, was obtained from Walker only after he was already in the hands of an angry mob and served the purpose of removing suspicion of another man (also African-American) already in custody.

From the description of what happened next, it seems that the crowd of men had been whiling away their time waiting for the sheriff to bring in Walker drinking for they were so drunk that Walker was able to escape from them–although only after they had put the noose around his neck.

The editors at The Sun seem to have found the whole affair rather amusing while the editors of The Times-Dispatch seem to want to assure their readers that Walker will soon be recaptured.

I sit here, 100 years later, and wonder what happened to Walker. Did he escape? Was his wife okay or did the angry mob go back to his home and take out on her the violence they were unable to visit on her husband? If Walker lived did he dream every night of that moment when the rope went around his neck and did he shiver with remembered fear every time he heard the sound of dogs in the distance?

Sometimes I wonder how much the readers of a hundred years from now will miss when reading things written today. Will most readers of the future find overly subtle the things which we now view as anvils and Chekhov\’s guns? I know that many of today\’s readers when reading books written a century ago miss clues and signs that would have been crystal clear to the original intended audience. Take for example this sentence from E. F. Benson\’s Gavron\’s Eye (published in 1912):

Also it was said that, although it was a hot afternoon, she wore a big cloak.

It is a wonderfully telling line that informs the character\’s past and foreshadows the character\’s future and one that may go right by a reader today if they are not used to Edwardian writing as well as social and class conventions.

People talk much about \”genre fiction\” and the necessity of being genre-savvy if one is to get everything out of particular types of texts. Similarly, reading books written in earlier times or different cultures requires the reader to be \”history/culture context savvy.\” The unsavvy reader may miss much of the careful characterization of the protagonist if, for example, they don\’t know about conventions that character is challenging or adhering to. Indeed they may even be aware that the character is acting in a particular way in relationship to a cultural convention because they are unaware of the convention itself.

How does one become context savvy? By doing a lot of reading. It helps if one can find editions with good annotations. Read many books from the same time/culture. Read books written a decade before and a decade after. If you are slightly obsessive compulsive you might consider ordering all the books on your shelves by date they were written so that you are aware that while Edith Wharton was writing this, Agatha Christie was writing that and T. S. Eliot was writing something else.

And if you are forced to share your shelves with someone who prefers the less heuristically useful convention of shelving books alphabetically by author\’s last name (within or across genres) then you at least have a publication order spreadsheet tucked away somewhere.

Trigger Warning: Quotations of language/imagery that is racially offensive

One hundred years ago the American Civil War was \”fifty years ago.\” Just as the New York Times has been running a series of \”100 years ago\” articles on the events that led up to, and occurred during, the Civil War, fifty ears ago The Times-Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia) was doing the same.

It isn\’t surprising to the non-American reader that there would be many bitter and lingering memories of Civil War in Richmond Virginia. Virginia itself was one of the states that seceded and become one of the Confederate States. The northwest portion of the state, in turn, seceded from Virginia. This area was then admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863, as the state of West Virginia. Richmond became the capital of the Confederate State of Virginia. Many of the readers of the Times Dispatch were either veterans of the Confederate Army, were relatives of members of the Confederate Army, had lived through the invasion and occupation of their city or had relatives who had lived through the invasion and occupation.

What is surprising is the degree to which the Confederate cause is treated as dominant, triumphant, honoured and powerful throughout this (as well as earlier and later) issues of the newspaper.

Bear in mind that the demographic of the newspaper\’s circulation was not the poor and disadvantaged of society. It\’s readership was not primarily made up of those who had been displaced and overthrown by shifts in power after the conclusion of the Civil War. The Times-Dispatch is full of society news and advertisements for pricey goods. In addition to the section to the society pages there was separate section for business and investments. To the left of the banner on the front page is a box with the text \”Children\’s page of T.D.C.C.\” and to the right a box with the text \”Confederate and Geneology.\” Page 2 is games and puzzles.

On page 3 of the October 29, 1911 edition the reader will find the regular Sunday Our Confederate Column. To the right of the column is the poem The Veterans\’ Cross of Honor and it is clear from its words that the veterans in the title are of the Confederate Army since they are said to wear the U.D.C. (United Daughters of the Confederacy) cross and the reader is told The wealth of world cannot purchase this emblem/Unless the buyer wore the gray too. The President of the encounter described in the article on the same page GENERAL PENDLETON AND THE PRESIDENT is Jefferson Davis (the first and only president of the Confederacy.)

Page 4 is set aside for cartoons which largely depend on crude and offensive stereotypes of African-Americans for their \”humour.\” The news in the society pages (and that is how they are titled) is of engagements, marriages and debutantes. The descriptions of the events (and the advertisements that accompany them) indicate that much of the readership is at least socially and financially \”comfortable\” if not more.

The Times-Dispatch had previously run articles about the final fate the great seal of the Confederate States. In this edition they print an \”answer\” to the question with a long interview with the man who had been Jefferson Davis\’ \”body servant.\” SECRET OF THE GREAT SEAL OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES: James H. Jones, Body-Servant to President Jefferson Davis, Tells How He Hid It, and Will Never Divulge Place of Concealment. The next page is largely given over to the article Stonewall Jackson–Protest Against Picture as Drawn in \”The Long Roll\” By His Wife, Mary Anna Jackson, a piece written, as billed, by Jackson\’s widow to protest and contradict the verbal picture of him and his behaviour in the recently published \”The Long Roll.\”

One might ask \”so what?\” These are just a group of relatively privileged people who can live with the myth of the glorious south and pen paeans to the gray clad \”heroes\” of the \”War between the states.\” There are two answers:

First, the Union may have won the war militarily but they have clearly lost it culturally. The society that had grown up in the south since the war did not see slavery as having been a moral wrong. By mythologizing antebellum society they turned any call for civil rights and equal treatment for African-Americans as an attack on the southern society\’s mores and heroes. African-American were born, grew up and were educated in a society in which the people who had gone to war to deny them their rights were lionized.

Second, in general (except as \”faithful body servants\”) African-Americans are for the most part absent from these pages. It is not in the \”news\” section of The Times-Dispatch that you read about lynchings. But if you turn to the \”Help Wanted\” section at the back of the paper you can see just how segregated life was in Richmond, Virginia was in 1911 and how delimited opportunities were on the basis of one\’s colour or one\’s gender.

Help Wanted: Male

• Wanted, White and colored men to work In nursery and on packing grounds
• WANTED-COLORED MEN WITH references wishing position as sleeping car or train porters, firemen or brakemen
• WANTED WHITE MAN TO WORK ON dairy farm

Help Wanted: Female

• SETTLED WHITE WOMAN OR GIRL wanted as general helper
• WANTED, AN EXPERIENCED COLORED nurse for children.
• WANTED. 50 WHITE AND COLORED women, cooks, maids, nurses
• WANTED, A COMPETENT WHITE nurse

The Civil War may have been over but the battle for Civil Rights still remained to be won.

Spoiler Warning: Discussion of the differences among the three presentations of the Blandings story will necessarily involve implicit and explicit spoilers

Jim and Muriel Blandings have been awoken by the alarm clock, he has received his morning glass of juice from the maid and brought Muriel\’s morning coffee to the bedroom. One daughter has finished showering and the other was last seen diving into the bathroom.

There is still more morning misery at the Blandings\’ home for the audience to witness.

Jim Blandings is feeling very put upon. He daughter asks him, very sharply, why every morning he neglects to knock on the bathroom door before opening it. I beg your pardon. Jim says peevishly after his daughter is out of earshot. Once in the bathroom he is clearly annoyed that someone has been squeezing the toothpaste tube from the middle and that items fall out of the medicine cabinet when he opens it. Jim proceeds to take a shower and is still in the bathroom (now shaving) while Muriel showers. When he opens the shower door to give her a washcloth (and then later a towel) the mirror becomes too steamed up to be of use. Jim, again, sighs to himself as only the put upon can sigh. Then Muriel, fresh from her shower, gets in his way as he continues to shave blocking out his view of the mirror. He cuts himself shaving and complains. I cut myself every morning. I kind of look forward to it. She asks, Why don\’t you use an electric razor?

This scene leaves me with a number of questions:

1. Why is Jim so annoyed when his daughter asks him to knock before barging into the bathroom?
2. Why won\’t Jim put up another shelf/mirror in the bathroom so that the storage space is adequate to the number of people sharing the room?
3. Why does Muriel need to shower at the same time that Jim is shaving?
4. What bathroom does Gussie (the maid) use?

One answer to questions 1-3 is, of course, because if they dealt reasonably with their limited space there would be no need for them to move to a very large house in the country. And therefore there would be no movie.

A second answer to questions 1-3 is that if the Blandings arranged they lives more efficiently their \”plight\” would not evoke as much sympathy from an audience made up of people who took home far less money and often had far less space than the family on the screen.

However the questions do bring some interesting thoughts to mind.

1) Earlier Jim didn\’t knock before opening his daughters\’ bedroom door. Jim treats all spaces as his. To knock is to acknowledge that someone else at least shares control over a space.

2) Jim doesn\’t do things. He is an executive. He is a manager. He tells other people to do things. Even he would, I think, feel slightly silly hiring a handyman to put up a bathroom shelf. If it is something that Jim doesn\’t know how to do (or cannot see himself doing) and it isn\’t a task that he can easily and routinely delegate to others then it never enters his conscious mind.

3) I think we can safely assume that Production Code would find it totally acceptable for either Muriel or Jim to use the toilet while the other is in the room however Muriel has to fix herself up so she can look like a nice upper middle housewife at breakfast. In the \”real world\” she would probably do this by getting up long before Jim so that she could use the bathroom before he got up. Muriel does not have a job. She doesn\’t need to get ready for work.

4) For those who have never seen the movie it may be important to point out that Gussie is African-American. It would be quite unlikely for the white maid of a white upper class family to use the same bathroom as did they but it would be totally unacceptable for an African-American maid to do so. So I found myself wondering if there were meager toilet facilities \”back there\” in the space Gussie used. Or perhaps there were facilities out in the hallway that all the \”help\” in the building used? Whatever the answer some of the square footage of that apartment was out of bounds to the Blandings given the attitudes at the time towards African-Americans.

So far the audience has seen life at the Blandings only through the eyes of Jim. And Jim sees himself as a put upon individual living in the middle of chaos and clutter. Thus members of the audience don\’t think to themselves that the Blandings have far more room than do they and if only if they used a little bit of elbow grease and common sense most of their problems would disappear.

How did the director/screenwriters make the ordinary member of the film going audience feel sympathy for and empathy with the Blandings given that the Blandings were clearly members of a socially, financially and culturally privilege class?

By putting the Blandings into contexts and circumstances that were understandable to that public and which even made members of the audience share their frustrations.

Spoiler Warning: Discussion of the differences among the three presentations of the Blandings story will necessarily involve implicit and explicit spoilers

Let\’s begin by looking at where the film, book and short story start. The short story (and the book) each begin in medias res. The Blandings have already found the house which will lead to their adventure with home ownership, restoration, destruction and construction.

The sweet old farmhouse burrowed into the upward slope of the land so deeply that you could enter either its bottom or middle floor at ground level…..In front of it, rising and spreading along the whole length of the house, was the largest lilac tree that Mr. and Mrs. Blandings had ever seen. Its gnarled, rusty trunks rose intertwined to branch and taper into splays of this year\’s light young wood; they, in turn, burst into clouds of blossoms that made the whole vast thing a haze of blues and purples, billowed and wafting. When the house was new, the lilac must have been a shrub in the dooryard–and house and shrub had gone on together, side by side since then. That was a hundred and seventy years ago, last April. [1] 309; [2] 3

Thus we first meet the Blandings without having any sense as to why they are looking for a home.

The movie, on the other hand, delays our first meeting with the Blandings, and indeed the Blandings desire to buy a home, until after carefully providing the audience with the context for why the Blandings were looking for a home. Indeed the very first shot of the film is of New York and the first word spoken is Manhattan. The voice of the narrator is that of Bill Cole (who we soon find out is the Blandings\’ lawyer and Jim Blandings best friend.) For the first minute and a half of the movie we hear paeans to Manhattan (wide streets, gracious living) while seeing the opposite on the screen (people struck in traffic jams and screaming at each other, people scrambling to get onto overfilled subway cars, people crowded into comfortless diners.) The \’amusing\’ disconnect between what is said and what is seen signals the audience to \”take with a grain of salt\” pronouncements made by the characters. The footage of the miseries of life in Manhattan prepare the audience to see the city as something anyone would leave, if only they could.

Bill Cole then tells the audience about the Blandings, the atypical \’typical\’ New Yorkers that we are to sympathize and empathize with–but doing so only after showing the discomfort and indignities of urban life and by reminding us that Jim and Muriel Blandings are just like thousands of other New Yorkers. While the claim that the Blandings are like thousands of other New Yorkers may be technically true (since in a city of such size there may well be thousands of members of the upper 3% of American society) they are not typical of the average American sitting in the audience in the cinema.

These verbal directions that we should see the Blandings as sharing the same misfortunes as do members of the audience are further buttressed by the audiences first glimpse of Jim and Muriel as we see the couple struggle through the difficulties of getting up, getting dressed and getting breakfast in an apartment which seems overfilled with people, furniture and possessions and undersupplied with closets and storage areas.

We first meet the Blandings as their alarm clock rouses them from sleep. (Since all the Blandings share the same last name from this point on I will refer to each by their first name.) Jim and Muriel (each, as the Production Code preferred, in a separate twin bed) each try sleepily to take control over the alarm clock — she trying to turn it off as he tries to turn it on. Then he makes his way across a room overcrowded with beds and dresser to the closet where he struggles to find his dressing gown among the clothes jammed in so tightly they seem not to need hangars at all. Having found his dressing gown he makes his way down the hall, knocking at the bathroom door to greet one daughter, going into the girls shared bedroom (we can see the twin beds) to wake the other, picks up the broom left behind in the living room, works his way around the table that almost completely fills the dining room, takes the cover off the bird cage and finally trades the broom he is carrying for the glass of juice that the maid has ready for him.

Insert here the sound of tires screeching. The Blandings have a maid. From all indications a live-in maid. Our supposedly typical New Yorker (Mr. Blandings) not only makes more than 97% of Americans and, unlike the vast majority of his generation, has a college degree, his family also has a maid.

Back to the movie….Once Jim has drunk his juice he trades the empty glass for a cup of coffee he takes back down the hall and gives to his wife who is still sitting, semi-comotose, in bed. Jim searches through the dresser for his underwear and socks. Directed by Muriel to look for his socks in the closet he clumsily moves around boxes only to have a number of them fall on him and the floor. Frustrated he heads to the bathroom. His daughter screams as he opens the door and enjoins him to knock before coming in. I find myself agreeing with her. Since he saw her running down the hall in front of him to get access to the bathroom before him it would seem only reasonable for him to check to see if she had finished using it before barging in.

By this point in the film it is fairly clear that Jim feels more than a little sorry for himself. It is not clear how much members of the audience are supposed to feel empathy or sympathy with him.

The movie has already passed the 10 minute point. We have met the Blandings, been shown how difficult, crowded and frantic life is in New York and are watching the family negotiate a morning in a crowded and badly organized apartment. The discomforts of their lives are being made salient to us and soon we will forget that in education, social and financial status the Blandings are quite unlike most of the audience.

The Blandings may be looking for their dream house. They already have a life that most members of the audience can only dream of.

[1] Hodgins, Eric.\”Mr. Blandings Builds His Castle\” in Adaptations : from short story to big screen : 35 great stories that have inspired great films. New York : Three Rivers Press, ©2005.

[2] Hodgins, Eric. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. New York : Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004, ©1946.

Canadian health care story/question.

Earlier today I spent some time in a doctor\’s waiting room. I had arrived rather early (sometimes all the traffic lights do go your way) so I settled down with my ereader to while my time away. Waiting rooms are interesting places which can vary radically in the emotional dynamic from day to day. Sometimes there are anxious young parents (or at least anxious parents with young children) who feel guilty that their child may bothering other people in the room. Sometimes there are people who are clearly worried that the news the doctor is about to give them may be bad. There is usually someone who carries with them the aroma of tobacco smoke and next to whom no non-smoker wishes to sit.

Last time I was in that waiting room an elderly woman came in, clutching a plastic bag full of medications. I could hear her wheezing as she went to the receptionist and then I heard her reply that she was too confused right now to remember her own postal code. The receptionist took what information she could get and the woman sat down next to me. She was clearly disturbed and worried so I smiled and said a few words to her and soon she calmed down enough to tell me why she had come in for an \”urgent care\” visit. Her regular doctor was on maternity leave and so she had never been to this doctor before (which is why they didn\’t have all her information on file). Her seasonal asthma had flared up, her inhaler didn\’t seem to be giving her any relief and she was afraid she wouldn\’t be able to fly to visit her ailing mother if the problem wasn\’t brought under control. Soon she was telling us (me and spouse) about her mother and the hospital she was in and how much nursing had changed since she had been in training. And as her panic subsided, her breathing became easier and her respiration quieter. In a few minutes my name was called and I left her talking to spouse. My own visit was short since I was just getting the results of some lab tests and as I came back out they called her name and she smiled at me and waved as she went, in her turn, to see the doctor.

Today someone in the waiting room asked me about my ereader and in the course of the conversation I learned that she was an administrator at a heath care unit in a neighbouring community. The waiting room was unusually quiet for that time of day and she was musing about the problems of predicting patient loads. Then I got called back to see my doctor and when I came out she was no longer there.

As I drove home I began to think about the democracy of waiting rooms. Most of us will find ourselves, at one time or another, waiting anxiously in a room full of other people waiting anxiously. Waiting rooms are, for many of us, one of the few places we spend time with people from very different walks of life. What goes on in those waiting rooms tells us much about the society in which we live.

For example: I was in a doctor\’s waiting room in the US when a man came in who wanted to see the doctor. They would not schedule an appointment for the man, not because the doctor was not accepting new patients (he was) but because the man had no insurance. What he had, instead, was cash. He was willing to pay upfront to see the doctor. His request was denied. Until he could prove he had insurance he would have to go emergency at the nearest public hospital. He pled \”but it isn\’t an emergency. It will take all day if they see me at all. I just want the doctor to….\” I heard no more for the receptionist wasn\’t interested in what the man wanted or needed done. He had no insurance.

For example: I was in a room in emergency at a hospital in the US. My doctor had sent me there for a series to tests to rule out the worst case explanation of the wheezing/tickling in my lungs. I had been wired up and tested for one thing, blood had been drawn to test for something else, I had just had a CAT scan and now I was waiting to see the doctor. Through my door I could see a bedraggled elderly couple–her sitting on a stool and him the floor. She was crying and I gave them some tissues and learned that they had been waiting for 8 hours sitting on a stool and the floor. They were poor, from out of state and had no insurance. I sat in my private room (I had excellent health insurance through work) and waited in comfort for reports on my tests. They sat in the hall and finally someone came by and did something that looked and sounded painful to the suppurating lesion on her arm. Then my doctor came in, told me that there was nothing wrong, all the tests were negative and I was free to go. I checked out, paying a copay that was probably more money than that bedraggled couple had to their name.

Like most Canadians I have complaints about the short comings of our health care system–but the most important thing is that for the most part Canadians are all in the same boat. Canadians who are comfortably well off receive, for the most part, the same care as Canadians who are not. If there is a shortage of doctors wealth won\’t buy your way into a doctor\’s practice. If there is a shortage of rooms at the hospital wealth won\’t buy you a bed a poorer person can\’t lie on. When my American friends say, in condemnation, \”you can\’t buy your way to the front of the line\” I nod my head in agreement and approval. Because when you can\’t buy your way to the front of the line you are highly motivated to make sure that that line is never very long.

I made a quick stop at the grocery store today. We were both in the mood for potato-leek stew so I wanted to get more leeks before our next regular shopping trip. Whenever I am at the store I check to see if there is a store special on anything we regularly use and which stores well. Today the brand of olive oil we use (and since we are vegans we use olive oil quite a bit) was on sale — 23% off. So of course I brought a few bottles of olive oil home along with the leeks.

As I was putting the olive oil away (we always put the most recently purchased items at the back the shelf and move the oldest to the front) I realized that everything in that particular cupboard had been bought on sale. We can afford to take advantage of store specials because we have a freezer large enough to hold a substantial amount of food and a bank account that allows us flexibility in our budgeting.

Those who are poor, those who barely scrape by from week to week, and those who are living on food stamps cannot take advantage of the same specials as do we. So those who least need to stretch their food budget are most able to do so.

Yet another invisible tax on being poor.