Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 369

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, 

 

For generations, people had navigated West Virginia in creative ways. Directions are delivered in paragraphs. Look for the white church, the stone church, the brick church, the old elementary school, the old post office, the old sewing factory, the wide turn, the big mural, the tattoo parlor, the drive-in restaurant, the dumpster painted like a cow, the pickup truck in the middle of the field. But, of course, if you live here, you probably don’t need directions; along the dirt lanes that wind through valleys and dry riverbeds, everyone knows everyone else anyway. 

Emergency services have rallied for more formal ways of finding people. Close your eyes and try to explain where your house is without using your address. Now try it again, but this time pretend you’re having a stroke. Paramedics rushed to a house in West Virginia described as having chickens out front, only to see that every house had chickens out front. Along those lanes, I was told, people come out on their porches and wave at strangers, so paramedics couldn’t tell who was being friendly and who was flagging them down.

The slums seemed to have more serious needs than addresses—sanitation, sources of clean water, healthcare, even roofs to protect them from the monsoon. But the lack of addresses was depriving those living in the slums a chance to get out of them. Without an address, it’s nearly impossible to get a bank account. And without a bank account, you can’t save money, borrow money, or receive a state pension. Scandals had exposed moneylenders and scam banks operating throughout Kolkata’s slums, with some residents reportedly committing suicide after losing their life savings to a crook. With their new addresses, more residents of Chetla can now have their own ATM cards, with accounts Subhashis and his staff helped to open at the Bank of Baroda.

Citizens should have a way to “reach and be reached by associations and government agencies,” and to be reached by fellow citizens, even ones they didn’t know before. In other words, without an address, you are limited to communicating only with people who know you. And it’s often people who don’t know you who can most help you.

Even before the earthquake, good maps of Haiti were hard to find. Haiti is not alone. Today, huge swaths of the world are insufficiently mapped, including many cities with more than a million people. It’s no surprise that these places happen to be the poorest places on earth. When asked about snakebite statistics in Brazil, scientist Maurício Rocha e Silva once said there were none. “Where there are snakes, there are no statistics; and where there are statistics, there are no snakes.” Often where epidemics break out, there are no maps either.

“The great enterprise of numbering the houses,” Tantner writes, “is characteristic of the eighteenth century. Without any trace of irony, the house number can be considered one of the most important innovations of the Age of Enlightenment, of that century obsessed, as it was, with order and classification.” House numbers were not invented to help you navigate the city or receive your mail, though they perform these two functions admirably. Instead, they were designed to make you easier to tax, imprison, and police. House numbers exist not to help you find your way, but rather to help the government find you. 

The invention of the house number is not a footnote to history, Tantner tells his readers, but a whole chapter within it.

As historian Vernon Carstensen has described, surveyors ambitiously set out across the country to record millions of acres in precise squares—all, somehow, “on the curved surface of the earth.” Some discharged their duties diligently. Others, whether from ineptitude, lack of proper tools, or drunkenness, drew squiggly lines. One reportedly measured the length of a buggy wheel with string, and then rested on a horse-drawn cart while he counted the rotations. But for the most part the land was laid out into neat parcels, with intersecting right angles. “The straight lines were spread over the prairies, the foothills, the mountains, over the swamps and deserts, and even over some of the shallow lakes,” Carstensen has written. “Like bees or ants or other well-organized societies, Americans, once they fixed upon the rectangular survey, were inflexible in their devotion to the idea.” Ultimately, the surveyors covered about 69 percent of land in the public domain in the Continental United States. 

As in Manhattan, gridding the West converted the land into easily traded gambling chips. But Carstensen, who has closely chronicled the land survey, found in it a higher purpose. “No one will ever know how much the straight lines of the rectangular surveys contributed to the public peace during the Nineteenth Century,” he wrote. In parts of the country where the map looked like a “crazy quilt,” like Tennessee and Kentucky, disputes over land boundaries had led to murderous, generations-long feuds. But gridded lands did not become the subject of vendettas. “Those neat survey lines caused the polyglot country to be able to divide it better. Robert Frost has told us that good fences make good neighbors. He might have told us that clean survey lines make for peaceful land settlement.”

In the United States, a proposal to name a street after King has sometimes ignited a race war. A 1993, in Americus, Georgia, a white fire official said he supported naming half of a street for King, so long as the other half could be named for James Earl Ray, his assassin. In Miami-Dade County, Florida, Martin Luther King Jr. signs were painted over with “General Roert E. Lee.” In 2002, a motorist mowed down newly erected MLK street signs in Mankato, Minnesota, while shouting racist epithets. In 2005 in Muncie, Indiana, a county employee allegedly said that the street name proponents were “acting like ni**ers.” The Department of Justice had to send in a mediator who worked with local citizens for three months.