confusionIt is important to realize that the most effective forms of propaganda do not falsify verifiable truths and circumstances; instead they weave a preconceived pattern of significance through cleverly judicious use of available objective facts.
Dr Curtis Saxton, in Endor Holocaust [theforce.net]
That photo may be the last time I ever see a sunset from my grandparents farm. They are not getting any younger and given the cost and time to make the trip to rural Minnesota from halfway around the world I don’t know when I will get the time and change to do it again. I’d like to do it again. My daughter — the driver behind this trip — really enjoyed the farm and the whole trip. And it would be nice for her to spend more time with her great-grandparents. Especially since she is the first great-grandchild.
When I was growing up I spent a few weeks every other year on my grandparents farm. A lot of things have changed, or at least my perception of a lot of things has changed since I stopped going on family vacation when I was a teenager.
The most obvious change is that my grandfather does not farm any more. He rents the land out. So gone are the cows and tractors that dominated the daily routine when I was a kid. Other changes that I see; a lot less crop diversity than I used to see. Everything was corn and soybean. There were not even that many cows, just a sea of corn and soybean. Interestingly my uncle, who still makes a living farming, says that most of their soybean crop is shipped to Taiwan and Singapore. It’s a small world when you consider that the soybean that turned into my stinky tofu in Singapore might have been planted and harvested by my uncle halfway around the world.
The other thing that you can’t help but notice is that windmills. Everywhere. I do remember there being one, or two power generating windmills off somewhere to the east the last few times I visited the farm as a kid. Now they are everywhere. And trucks carrying 100 foot blades are all over the roads. Seeing all the windmills gives me a bit more hope that despite the blowhards in Washington and their inability to move beyond the “did we cause it” to the “how to stop it” discussions on global warming (or climate change) that the world is moving on without them. The exploitation of renewable energy sources is proceeding apace in the commercial world; let the politicians blow on.
You can see the whole Pipestone, MN, USA, September 2010 photoset on Flickr [flickr.com].
I enjoyed The Hamlet more than The Sound and The Fury. Fury just required too much work on the readers part. The story was brilliant but the payoff was not worth the work over all. The Hamlet, while still requiring some work on the readers part to dive past the colloquial language of the dialog, appreciate the setting and, to some extent, deal with the modernist [wikipedia.org] style elements.
The Hamlet is about the invasion of a small mythical southern every-town; Frenchman’s Bend, by the Snopes family. Detailing a number of Snopes’ and their eccentricities while relying on the non-Snopes character of Ratliff to provide grounded commentary and continuity. The Hamlet is mostly a comic novel, in places laugh-out-loud funny, set against the not so funny experience of life in the post reconstruction South.
I think that, like most of Faulkner‘s [wikipedia.org] books the Americana is more than a surface veneer. I don’t find Faulkner’s stories to be timeless, place-less classics. Rather they are a specific meditation on the times and situations of the post-reconstruction American South. I have a hard time imagining how anyone who has lived their entire life in New York City could come close to appreciating Faulkner’s writing, much less how someone from another country could appreciate them in any great depth. The fact that the books do sell and are liked by people from outside the South amazes me. But they are, and Falkner did win the Nobel Prize for Literature. So…
I have two tenuous connections to Faulkner’s South, one general and the other specific. Generally, I grow up in rural Virginia, the South lite, and spent time in my grandparents house in Alabama, the South by any measure. This helped me to penetrate the language of The Hamlet enough to allow me to read the book in a fluid, natural way without struggling over the language used by the characters, making back and forth dialog enjoyable (as opposed to the Sisyphean effort require to digest the dialog in Ulysses [confusion.cc].) More specifically, I grew up in Charlottesville, home to UVA where Faulkner was “Writer in Residence” twice in 1957 and 1958. How I managed to read so little Faulkner in school (just The Bear short story to my recollection) is a mystery to me.
Interestingly, and perhaps contrary to what I say above, my post-high-school re-introduction to Faulkner came in the form of a friend who grew up in New York City. After moving to C’ville and living in a ‘house-too-far-back-in-the-woods’, in his own words, he moved downtown (such as it is) and became obsessed for a time with reading about the old South. Faulkner was his main source. It did nothing to dispel his fears of being molested in the woods by some Deliverance-esque hicks. Despite confirming his worst fears about the nature of southerners, my friend enjoyed Faulkner immensely enough that his recommendation put Faulkner on my list of to-reads. It only took me 11 years to get around to reading any.
I spent three weeks in September in the US visiting some of the various parts of my family. My family is widely dispersed around the US; my Parents and sisters in Virginia, my mother’s parents in Southern Minnesota and my father’s brother and mother in Iowa. I didn’t visit my aunts and uncles on my mother’s side as I would have to include Arizona, Oregon, South Dakota, Montana, and I don’t even know where. One of my cousins is either in Alaska or Russia somewhere—I think. The point of this is that my family lives is typically rural area’s of the US and for the entirety of my trip I had no access to the Internet accept via dial-up at my parents house or WiFi at coffee shops. Being that this was a vacation the lack of internet was not really an issue, and was quite refreshing to be offline for an extended period of time, I only resorted to coffee shops to help coordinate meet-ups with friends and to book and check-in to flights and rental cars. But the lack of connectivity did get me thinking about the government’s plans for extending the reach of broadband.
The current situation, lack of broadband access in these type of rural locations, is the result of a the heady mix of demographics and economics know as capitalism. The demographics are thus: I spent half my vacation at my parents house in rural Virginia; in the suburbs of a mid-sized city of about 40,000 people, plus an additional 10 to 12 thousand students during the school year. According to the US Census estimates for last year, if you add in the surrounding county (where my parents actually live) you come close to 130,000 people. According to the census 2000 numbers the population density is about 110 people per square mile. For clarity my parents house is about a mile from the interstate sitting on an acre of land surrounded by an approximately equal mix of houses and forested land with some farmland thrown in for good measure.
The second half of my time was spent at my mothers’ parents’ house. Farm I should say. The farm is in Minnesota in a county of less than 10,000 people, their nearest neighbor is… well, lets say that nobody can hear you scream, unless maybe you are Jamie Lee Curtis and it’s Halloween. The population density where my grandparents live is about 22 people per square mile, but that’s misleading as 4,000 of the people in the county live in ‘town’. Corn and Soy Bean as far as the eye can see, and a few cows. Corn fed middle America it is.
That broadband is not available at my grandparents house is understandable and I won’t bemoan the situation too much. However, my parents live in a fairly progressive place and they both work, in town, at one of the top public universities in the US. A university, I should note, that provided both of them with email addresses way back in 1994. The oldest emails in my archive are from back then when I was using my fathers account over dial-up (direct to the university) — along with the internet access it came with, an internet composed of services with names like Gopher [wikipedia.org] and WAIS [wikipedia.org]. An Internet accessed via a modem who’s speed was measured in baud. That’s right baud [wikipedia.org].
The economics is put forth by the major ISP‘s as to why they have not expanded their coverage to include these types of rural locations. The argument boils down to ‘it is not economical to build and maintain the infrastructure to supply broadband to these areas with low population density’, that they could not recoup the capital and operational investment in a reasonable time frame. Since I’m not a number cruncher I will not argue this point, but remember the argument, you’ll hear it again.
Now the government wants to extend broadband access to the rural masses. Billions of dollars are going to be handed out to companies. The most likely recipients for the majority of this cash are, of course, the same ISPs who have failed to deliver broadband to the rural masses to date under the assumption that this money will cover most or all of the investment making it more worthwhile to build and maintain the infrastructure.
I have little faith in this vision. I expect that the ISPs will take the money and will show some effort to provide coverage but little will be achieved and soon the ISPs will be back at the watering hole requesting another drink. That, it seems to be is what happens when the Government gives money to existing industrial player to try and entice them.
Now, a little history. About a hundred years ago humanity tamed electricity. Over the next few decades big cities were lit, but the rural population was stuck in the age of oil lamps. Originally this had a lot to do with the problem of power transmission but that was eventually solved (and I recommend you read up on the early days of electricity: Edison and Tesla, AC/DC, death threats, supreme court battles and electrified elephants… You can’t make this shit up!) Once the issues of power generation and transmission were solved the problem became one of economics. It was simply not profitable to invest huge sums of capital into power stations and transmission infrastructure to electrify the sparsely populated countryside.
The government eventually stepped in, as part of the New Deal, via the Rural Electrification Administration. The REAs mission was to enable the electrification of the countryside, — the farms and small towns. This was accomplished via the funding and creation of rural electrical coops. Non-profit organizations that took on the task of building transmission infrastructure on places where the established electrical companies would not. Most Coops didn’t produce power, they purchased it from the established power generators or coops specifically focused on the power generation side of the equation. But the government had to compel the existing power companies to sell power to the coops. Arguments were made that the coops were competitors and the power companies would be broken by providing power to their competitors.
In the end the coops did get power from the big boys, and they did build transmission lines and provide service to many rural areas. I would go so far as to say that the rural electric coops where a great success, considering the fact that both my parents and my grandparents get their power for coops to this day. In fact the list of electric coops in the US [wikipedia.org] is impressive.
Since the arguments around rural broadband about demographics and economics are the same as those around rural electrification long ago might the same system be a better place to spend money on broadband today? The existing transmission coops could even utilize government money to focus on building out Ethernet Over Power (EOP) systems to utilize their existing investment in infrastructure, thus removing much of the right-or-way and other issues that raise the cost of bringing broadband infrastructure to rural areas without or with older cable infrastructure or with older telephone infrastructure.
Of course the whole process of awarding the rural broadband money will no doubt be driven by the lobbying of entrenched interests. So rural broadband coops will most likely remain a dream.