Forget About Six Degrees of Separation. Today Is Trending Toward No Degrees of Separation When It Comes to My Neighbors and Neighborhood Being in the News

My home diggings of North Texas aren’t exactly the center of the world (though the region is pretty central to a lot of things, including both U.S. coasts), we’re making news at the moment like we are not far removed from the center of the world. You can choose between the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good. For a couple of years, a patch of land abutting the George Bush Turnpike just south and a little east of my home and office has looked like a nestling ground for giant cranes—the building construction type.

Today, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman told his readers an attention-arresting story about what is being built there. In Friedman’s words, “the most impressive project” promoting green ecological values he’s seen in America. It’s being built by Texas Instruments, the semiconductor chip manufacturer. If memory serves, the huge structure is costing a couple of billion dollars.

Friedman notes that what’s there at the new TI plant, fascinating as it is, isn’t as interesting as what isn’t there. One whole floor is missing, for example. Wafer-making plants usually have three floors, but this one only two. Why? Because with the help of Amory Lovins, the ecology-minded head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, TI’s sustainable design team found ways to compress the complex cooling and manufacturing process. The TI/RMI team cut utility costs by 20 percent and wafer usage by 35 percent. One complete huge industrial air conditioner was eliminated. And no detail was too small: the urinals use no water. The cost of TI’s new green building was cut by 30 percent from the cost of the company’s previous most comparable facility. This is one of those justifiable Texas-proud moments.

The Bad. We are in the midst of the worst drought in Texas since the 1950s, which was the worst (if memory serves) since the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. You may have been reading about it. We’ve been losing virtually entire little towns to raging prairie fires, made super-incendiary by parched grasses and brush. (We ended 2005 about 17 inches below our yearly rainfall average.)

In my part of North Texas, a lot of the damage is silent and insidious. The reason is the soils that our houses, buildings and streets are built on. We call it gumbo. It’s a clay. When it gets wet, it expands like rising dough. And as it dries contracts like drying prunes. Our building foundations and street beds can’t take it. Large cracks open in walls and pavement. In the best of times moisture-wise, it’s like a slow-motion earthquake. In a severe drought, with our deep-rooted trees soaring up every available drop of underground moisture, it’s a contagion without a flame.

I’ve been lucky. Last spring, frustrated at my inability to keep the cracks in my walls at bay even though I was running soaker hoses around my foundation 24/7 and had installed 30 deep concrete piers to underpin my foundation, I called in a soil engineer. He had an idea. “Lets built a moat around your house and keep it filled,” he suggested. We did, and it has worked. My house has remained stable because it sits on continuously wet clay now. The water bill is high. But I just look at it as an increase in the cost of my insurance.

The Ugly. The new A&E cop show, Dallas SWAT, pushes the American psyche several degrees closer to the depravity of the Roman Empire’s gladiator days. In a state that ranks close to the bottom in almost any listing of the 50 states’ expenditures for caring for its poor, its mentally ill, its children and its prisoners, we really didn’t need this grotesque, nightmarish “Blade Runner”-in-real-life reminder of what our Texas tax dollars are actually spent for. And what really gets glorified in this schizophrenic state’s pantheon of he-man pursuits and excesses.

America is a very violent country. Our police are as violent as almost any in the world because the streets where they work are often as violent as almost any in the world. But any time you dramatize a Texas slice of life, it seems to loom larger than life. Why couldn’t A&E have used Philadelphia’s SWAT team? Or Phoenix’s? They all look the same. Their swagger is similar. Their often automaton-like procedures all follow the same rules. The Dallas Police Department is a troubled department. Poor management and leadership, under-funding and the societal immaturity of the city it serves are obstacles against which it constantly struggles. The city and the department needed its Orwellian-like SWAT team featured on worldwide TV like they needed another fake drug scandal.

And that’s the way it is in North Texas today, Mr. Cronkite.

Posted on January 18, 2006

If You Really Want to Know What I Have Against "Motivational Experts," I'm Glad You Brought the Subject Up

Four of the most egregiously unfair and misused words in this language are “You can do it.” And I’m guilty at abusing them, too.

Because in using those words to urge our children or employees or students or anyone else forward in the performance of a task they’ve not done before or at which they are performing poorly, we are often claiming ownership of information and insight that, in most cases, is simply absent.

Who really knows exactly what your brain is capable of? I certainly don’t? And how could you possibly know what my brain is capable of? You shouldn’t presume to know. And neither of us should be telling each other, or anyone else, that we can do something unless there is evidence that this might be so, and even then there are important intermediate steps that usually get left out. We can call it The 3-Way Test of Achievability.

• Would you like to do it?
• How do you think you might best go about it?
• Is it worth the effort that is going to be required?

When and only when we have affirmative answers to those questions, do you and I have any reasonable right to offer someone the encouragement that “You can do it.”

In the past few days, I’ve had at least three experiences reminding me that there are things that, in all likelihood, I can’t do. At least, in all likelihood, I’m not going to do them, and so, on these subjects, I fail The 3-Way Test of Achievability.

1) Sitting in our neighborhood deli, Sherry and I were still waiting on our food when the private envelope of our morning conversation was suddenly pierced by a sheet of drawing paper. On the paper, with remarkable fidelity to visages we both were used to observing in the bathroom mirror, were two people seated at a deli restaurant table, having their morning conversation. When we looked up, the artist was beaming at us. He’d been sitting at the table across the aisle, sketching away, unnoticed by either of us. I’m quite sure I’ll never be able to do what he had just done because my brain doesn’t work that way. He said his gift was something he had discovered in himself. He doesn’t use it professionally but, wanting to do something with it, he does things like draw unsuspecting strangers in their morning conversation and spring their portraits on them.

2) One of our local high school seniors has taken the three-hour exam that's supposed to measure a high school student's chance of academic success in the first year of college—the dread SAT—twice . . . and achieved a perfect score both times. Asked to explain how he does this, the best he could offer was, “It helps to remember what you have studied.” I don’t need to test this talented mind to be very suspicious that he can’t help but remember what he has studied. This is just the way his brain works. I’ve always marveled at how quickly and totally my brain erases what I’ve just studied once the immediate reason for cramming has been satisfied. I’m quite sure I was not designed to achieve perfect scores on the SAT. Not even once, much less twice.

3) At a used book sale the other day, I spotted a thin, jacket-less little volume titled Mind’s Eye of Richard Buckminster Fuller. There was a time when I spent a lot of time devouring Bucky Fuller’s writings—and pretending to understand most of what I’d just read. Two things in life I’m pretty certain of: (1) Buckminster Fuller was a genius. (2) Virtually no one really understands very much of what he had to say. A really gifted mind can understand a part of it. But by the time you understand that part, Bucky is off rattling the tea cups in some other authority’s buffet. Here, though, was a guy—Bucky’s patent attorney!—ready to show us how Mr. Fuller’s mind worked. So I snatched up Donald W. Robertson’s book (it’s only 109 pages long) and figured I was about to be handed the secret to deciphering one of the 20th Century's most creative intellects. But no such luck. All that attorney Robertson knew was how to describe approximately how Bucky happened to think up an invention so it stood a chance of being awarded a patent. (Robertson's applications weren't always successful because sometimes the patent office attorneys didn't understand Robertson well enough to understand if Bucky, on that, occasion could be understood).

Three more things in life I’m pretty sure of. No matter how many times you tell me “you can do it!” I’ll never be able to (1) draw a detailed likeness of you eating breakfast that will cause you to say, “That’s amazing!” (2) take the SAT and get a perfect score (once, much less twice) or (3) be able to look at much of anything with the kind of unique visioning capabilities of one of modern times' most fascinating minds.

The moral of the story: Please save your encouragement for my doing something reasonably doable, and something that I really want to do (and maybe that the world would benefit from my doing), and I’ll return the favor. Thanks!

Posted on January 03, 2006