Pylimitics

October 26 is notable for several things, but in the US in the early 1800s the most notable might have been the completion of the Erie Canal in 1821. It was a very big deal back in the day; a 363-mile-long waterway connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. It meant that you could ship reasonably large quantities of whatever goods you had without finding enough pack animals to carry 250 pounds at a time, not to mention walking all those miles. 

It was a massive public-works project sponsored by New York governor DeWitt Clinton, so naturally the deficit hawks of the time derided it at Clinton’s Folly or Clinton’s Big Ditch. But they changed their tunes pretty quickly after it opened and they saw the effects it had. For one thing, it reduced the cost of shipping by about 95%, and cut the time by a bit (everything still moved at walking speed because the barges were pulled by the same pack animals). It also meant that if you had goods in, say, Ohio, that you could sell to Europe (probably grain), you could send them through the port of New York. And if you had goods from Europe to sell anywhere west, you’d send those through New York too. That connection from the coast to the interior, more than anything else, made New York the premier port city in the US for many decades. 

Even though the canal was so long, and used 36 locks to reach an elevation of 571 feet above sea level — and it was all dug manually — it only took four years to construct. It also featured aqueducts — 32 of them — which present the slightly surprising situation of a bridge for water, usually over a different body of water. Most of the canal was lined with stones set in clay, and the hundreds of masons employed in the project went on to build quite a bit of New York City. 

All the work on the canal was manual labor, but it wasn’t all human labor. A kind of horse- or ox-driven plow was designed to work like a bulldozer, and that helped. The water itself helped too; in some cases water from the Mohawk River was used to clear a channel for the canal. 

When the canal opened, horses or mules (at least one of which was named “Sal”) pulled barges from a towpath. There was only one path but two directions, so a fairly complex set of informal rules governed what happened when two canal boats going opposite directions met. The time advantage of the canal increased as the boatmen and lock operators got better at their jobs, until eventually shipping goods on the canal became twice as fast as any other method. Most of that advantage came from switching crews and continuing all night. 

There were passenger boats on the canal too, right from the beginning. Overnight boats held 40 passengers, and if they were just on the boat for a day, over 100 people could fit. Passenger boats are the main things you’ll see on the canal nowadays. There’s still some freight traffic, but not exactly like 1855 (the peak year), when there were 33,000 commercial shipments. In 2008, there were…well, just 42. When fuel costs go up, so does canal shipping, but it’s still more than twice as efficient as a train, and about 10 times better than trucks. 

October 26 is notable for several things, but in the US in the early 2000s the most notable might have been the passage of the USA PATRIOT act on October 26, 2001. It’s presented in all caps because, believe it or not, it’s an acronym. Ridiculously enough, it stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. I’m not making this up. The three main things it was supposed to do were to expand all sorts of surveillance, make it easier for federal agencies to share the information they’d gathered, and keep people in prison indefinitely when they’re accused of terrorism. That that they only have to be accused, not convicted. Since they can be jailed indefinitely now, why bother with trials, right?  

The act has changed US society extensively; presumably much more than anybody responsible for it anticipated. One effect has been keeping more government activities secret and not subject to overview or review, as long as they use the word “terrorism”. According to many, it’s also the prime mover behind the the polarization and extremism in the country. Part of the problem is that although there’s now a huge establishment of laws, agencies, and people fighting “terrorism”, it’s not easy to get any agreement about just what terrorism is. It’s violent, for sure (except when it isn’t), and it’s international (except when it’s domestic), and at least according to the FBI’s attempt at a definition, it’s inspired by or associated with other nations (unless it isn’t), or influences that might be political, religious, social, racial, or economic. About the only thing that can’t be terrorism is something like robbing a bank — except that could be too, depending on why you did it. Or why somebody can claim about why you did it. Remember the “accused, not convicted” thing above.

Vagueness can be a dangerous tool in public discourse. This is an area of serious study; there’s even the Hiller Vagueness Dictionary that lists the words and techniques best employed when you want to seem to say something without really saying much at all. People study that sort of thing — Wendell Potter certainly did. He was in charge of public relations at the Cigna insurance company when it looked like Americans had gotten so fed up with the health care system that they might be ready to do something about it (this was more than 30 years ago; we’re still waiting). Since the healthcare system in Canada operated much more efficiently even then, with better outcomes and far less cost, and the healthcare insurers definitely didn’t want the US system to become less expensive, the solution was to imply, without really saying, that Canadians had to wait a long, long time to get any kind of healthcare. It wasn’t true, of course, but then…Potter made sure they didn’t really say that it was true. 

One of Potter’s basic playbooks was a book published in 1954 called How to Lie with Statistics. It includes all sorts of tips, including the idea that if there are two facts listed close to each other, but the relationship between them is kept vague, many readers in the US will assume that one caused the other. For instance, if you show a photo of a patient on a stretcher waiting in a hospital hallway in an article about healthcare in Canada, some readers might conclude that the patient is in a Canadian hospital, and that one patient waiting in the hall suggests that other patients have to wait on stretchers in hospital hallways too. You’re supposed to think that maybe, in Canada, all the patients wait on stretchers in the hall. (They don’t, and that photo wasn’t even taken in Canada.)

Potter’s PR campaign worked so well that in the US, it’s now very common for people to think that healthcare in Canada is plagued by delays, bad outcomes, and is generally Something We Don’t Want Here. Potter himself, though, knew none of that was true, and eventually couldn’t live with his (leading) role in popularizing the idea. So he quit his job and became a whistleblower and advocate for universal health care. Thanks for nothing, Potter.

Vagueness has been a rhetorical weapon for a long time; maybe since the early days of language. The only solution to the problems it causes (too often purposefully) is specificity; actual details. The kind of information provided by journalists like Ida B. Wells, who published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases in 1892. On October 26, in fact. It became a national story, shedding light on what was really going on in the south after Reconstruction. Reconstruction, of course, was supposed to provide a better future for everybody in the south after the Civil War. As a result of Wells’ reporting, lynching was stopped, white supremacy disappeared…oops, no, what really happened was that a white mob burned down her Memphis newspaper building, destroyed her printing presses, and she had to escape to Chicago. But she kept writing and speaking about civil rights and women’s suffrage. In 1917 the government put her under surveillance as a “dangerous race agitator” — even without any new laws named by a tortured acronym. But at least Ida B. Wells was never vague.