by Bill Bryson
The saddest part of this zealous vindictiveness is that it simply does not work. America spends $50 billion a year fighting drugs, and yet drug use goes on and on. Confounded and frustrated, the government enacts increasingly draconian laws until we find ourselves at the ludicrous point where the Speaker of the House can seriously propose to execute people—strap them to a gurney and snuff out their lives—for possessing the botanical equivalent of two bottles of vodka, and no one anywhere seems to question it.
My solution to the problem would be twofold. First, I would make it a criminal offense to be Newt Gingrich. This wouldn’t do anything to reduce the drug problem, but it would make me feel much better. Then I would take most of that $50 billion and spend it on rehabilitation and prevention. Some of it could be used to take busloads of youngsters to look at that school friend of mine on his Iowa porch. I am sure it would persuade most of them not to try drugs in the first place. It would certainly be less brutal and pointless than trying to lock them all up for the rest of their lives.
We have a man named Walt who does a little carpentry around the house from time to time. He looks to be about 112 years old, but goodness me the man can saw and hammer. He has been doing handiwork around town for at least fifty years.
Walt lives in Vermont, just across the Connecticut River from our little town, and is a proper New Englander—honest, hardworking, congenitally disinclined to waste time, money, or words. (He converses as if he has heard that someday he will be billed for it.) Above all, like all New Englanders, he is an early riser. Boy, do New Englanders like to get up early. We have some English friends who moved here a few years ago. Soon after arriving the woman called the dentist for an appointment and was told to come at 6:30 the following day. She showed up the next evening to find the dentist’s office in darkness. They had meant 6:30 A.M., of course. If Walt were told to come for a dental appointment at that hour I am positive he would ask if they had anything a little earlier.
Anyway, the other day he arrived at our house a few minutes before seven and apologized for being late because the traffic through Norwich had been “fierce.” What was interesting about this was not the notion that traffic in Norwich could ever be fierce but that he pronounced it “Norritch,” like the English city. This surprised me because everyone in Norwich and for miles around pronounces it “Nor-wich” (i.e., with the “w” sounded, as in “sandwich”).
I asked him about that.
“Ayuh,” he said, which is an all-purpose New England term, spoken in a slow drawl and usually accompanied by the removal of a cap and a thoughtful scratching of the head. It means, “I may be about to say something . . . but then again I may not.” He explained to me that the village was pronounced “Norritch” until the 1950s, when outsiders from places like New York and Boston began to move in and, for whatever reason, started to modify the pronunciation. Now virtually everyone who is younger than Walt, which is virtually everyone, pronounces it “Nor-wich.” That seemed to me quite sad, the idea that a traditional local pronunciation could be lost simply because outsiders were too inattentive to preserve it, but it’s only symptomatic of a much wider trend.
Thirty years ago, three-quarters of the people in Vermont were born there. Today the proportion has fallen to barely half, and in some places it is much lower. In consequence, these days you are far less likely than you once were to hear locals pronouncing cow as “kyow,” saying “so don’t I” for “so do I,” or employing the colorful, if somewhat cryptic, expressions for which the state was once widely noted. “Heavier than a dead minister” and “jeezum-jee-hassafrats” are two that spring to mind if not, alas, to many Vermont tongues any longer.
If you go to the remoter corners of the state and hang out at a general store you might just overhear a couple of old farmers (pronounced “fahmuhs”) asking for “a frog skin more” of coffee or saying “Well, wouldn’t that just jar your mother’s preserves,” but more probably it will be urban refugees in L.L. Bean attire asking the storekeeper if he has any guavas.
The same thing has been happening all over the country. I have just been reading an academic study on the dialect of Ocracoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. Ocracoke is part of the Outer Banks, a chain of barrier islands where the inhabitants once spoke a hearty patois so rich and mysterious that visitors sometimes supposed they had stumbled on some half-lost outpost of Elizabethan England.
The locals—sometimes called “Hoi-Toiders” for the way they pronounced “high tide”—had an odd, lilting accent that incorporated many archaic terms, like “quammish” (meaning to feel sick or uneasy), “fladget” (for a piece of something), and “mommuck” (meaning to bother) that hadn’t been heard since Shakespeare put away his quill. Being a maritime people they also used nautical terms in distinctive ways. For instance, “scud,” meaning to run before a gale with a small amount of sail, was employed for land-based movements, so that an Ocracoker might invite you to go for a scud in his car. Finally, just to make the bewilderment of outsiders complete, they absorbed a number of non-English words, like “pizer” (apparently from the Italian “piazza”) for a porch, and pronounced the lot in a way that brought to mind Ringo Starr doing a Dorset accent. It was, in short, an interesting dialect.
All this scudded along, as you might say, in a dependable fashion until 1957 when the federal government built Ocracoke a bridge to the mainland. Almost at once tourists came in and the Ocracoke dialect began to go out.
All of this was scientifically monitored and recorded by linguists from North Carolina State University, who made periodic field trips to the island over half a century, on each visit noting a steady and seemingly terminal decline in the fragile idiolect. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the Ocracoke dialect began to undergo a revival. The researchers found that middle-aged people—those who had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s when tourism first became a dominant feature of island life—not only were returning to the old speechways but actually had more pronounced accents than their elders. The explanation, the researchers surmise, is that the islanders “exaggerate their island dialect features, whether consciously or not, because they want there to be no mistake that they are ‘real’ Ocracokers and not tourists or new residents recently relocated from the mainland.”
Much the same sort of phenomenon has been found elsewhere. A study of the dialect on Martha’s Vineyard revealed that certain traditional pronunciations there, such as flattening of the “ou” sound in words like “house” and “mouse,” making them something more like “hawse” and “mawse,” staged an unexpected rally after nearly going extinct. The driving force, it turned out, was natives who returned to the island after living away and embraced the old speech forms as a way of distinguishing themselves from the mass of nonnatives.
So does this mean that the rich and chewy Vermont accent will likewise recover and that once again we can expect to hear people say that something “would give you a pain where you never had an ache” or that they “felt rougher than a boar’s rear end”? Sadly, it seems not. From the evidence, it appears that these dialectal revivals happen only on islands or in communities that are in some way still comparatively isolated.
So it seems likely that when old Walt finally hangs up his saw and hammer whoever takes his place won’t sound like an old-time Vermonter even if he was born and reared there. I only hope he’s not such an early riser.
The other day something in our local newspaper caught my eye. It was an article reporting that the control tower and related facilities at our local airport are to be privatized. The airport loses money, so the Federal Aviation Administration is trying to cut costs by contracting out landing services to some-one who can do it more cheaply. What especially caught my attention was a sentence deep in the article that said, “A spokeswoman with the Federal Aviation Administration’s regional office in New York City, Arlene Sarlac, could not provide the name of the company that will be taking over the tower.”
Well, that’s really reassuri
ng to hear. Now maybe I am hypertouchy because I use the airport from time to time and have a particular interest in its ability to bring planes down in an approximately normal fashion, so I would rather like to know that the tower hasn’t been bought by, say, the New England Roller Towel Company or Crash Services (Panama) Ltd., and that the next time I come in to land, the plane won’t be guided in by some guy on a stepladder waving a broom. I would hope, at the very least, that the Federal Aviation Administration would have some idea of whom they were selling the tower to. Call me particular, but it seems to me that that’s the sort of thing you ought to have on file somewhere.
The FAA, it must be said, is not the most efficient of enterprises. A recent report noted that the agency had been plagued for years by power failures, malfunctioning and antiquated equipment, overworked and overstressed staff, inadequate training programs, and mismanagement owing to a fragmented chain of command. With regard to equipment standards, the report found that “21 separate offices issued 71 orders, 7 standards, and 29 specifications.” The upshot was that the FAA didn’t have any idea what equipment it owned, how it was being maintained, or even whose turn it was to make the coffee.
Even more ominously, according to the Los Angeles Times, “at least three airliner accidents may have been prevented had the FAA not fallen behind schedule in planned modernization of air traffic control equipment.”
I mention this because our subject today is large-scale incompetence in my native land. I wouldn’t say that America is a particularly outstanding place to find incompetence. But when you do find incompetence here it does tend to be particularly outstanding. Partly this is because it is a big country. Big countries spawn big bureaucracies. Those bureaucracies spawn lots of departments, and each of those departments issues lots of rules and regulations. An inevitable consequence is that with so many departments the left hand not only doesn’t know what the right hand is doing but doesn’t seem to know that there is a right hand. This is interestingly illustrated by frozen pizza.
In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture. Each sets its own standards with regard to content, labeling, and so on and has its own team of inspectors and set of regulations that require licenses, compliance certificates, and all kinds of other costly paperwork. And that’s just for frozen pizza. Altogether, it has been estimated, the cost to the nation of complying with the full whack of federal regulations is $668 billion a year, an average of $7,000 per household. That’s a lot of compliance.
What gives American inefficiency its particular tang, however, is a peculiar affection for parsimony. There is a short-termism here, particularly in official circles, that is often simply arresting. Consider an experience of the Internal Revenue Service.
Every year an estimated $100 billion in taxes—a sum larger than the gross national product of many countries— goes unreported and uncollected. In 1995, as an experiment, Congress gave the IRS $100 million of extra funding to go looking for some of this extra money. At the end of the year it had found and collected $800 million—only a fraction of the missing money but still $8 of extra government revenue for every $1 of additional collection costs.
The IRS confidently predicted that if the program were extended it would net the government at least $12 billion of missing tax revenues the following year, with more to come in succeeding years. Instead of expanding the program, Congress chopped it as—wait for it—part of its federal deficit reduction program. Do you begin to see what I mean?
Or take food inspection. All kinds of high-tech gizmos exist to test meat for microbial infestations like salmonella and E. coli. But the government is too cheap to invest in these, so federal food inspectors continue to inspect meat visually, as it rolls past on assembly lines. Now you can imagine how attentively a low-paid federal food inspector is going to be looking at each of 18,000 identical plucked chickens sliding past him on a conveyor belt every day of his working life. Call me a cynic, but I very much doubt that after a dozen years or so of this an inspector is likely to be thinking: “Hey, here come some more chickens. These might be interesting.” In any case—and here’s a point that you would think might have occurred to somebody by now—microorganisms are invisible.
As a result, by the government’s own admission, as much as 20 percent of all chicken and 49 percent of turkey is contaminated. What all this costs in illness is anybody’s guess, but it is thought that as many as 80 million people may get sick each year from factory-contaminated food, costing the economy somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion in additional health care costs, lost productivity, and so on. Every year nine thousand people die of food poisoning in the United States.
All of which brings us back to the good old Federal Aviation Administration. (Actually it doesn’t, but I had to get here somehow.) The FAA may or may not be the most inefficient bureaucracy in the United States, but it is indubitably the only one that has my life in its hands when I am 32,000 feet above the earth, so you may imagine my disquiet at learning that it is handing over our control tower to some people whose names it can’t remember.
According to our newspaper, the handover will be complete by the end of the month. Three days after that, I am irrevocably committed to flying to Washington from that airport. I mention this merely in case you find a blank space here in a couple of weeks.
But it probably won’t come to that. I just asked my wife what we are having for dinner.
Turkey burgers, she said.
A researcher at the University of California at Berkeley recently made a study of the nation’s walking habits and found that the average person in the United States walks less than 75 miles a year—about 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. I’m no stranger to sloth myself, but that’s appallingly little. I rack up more mileage than that just looking for the channel changer.
Eighty-five percent of us, according to the Berkeley study, are “essentially” sedentary and 35 percent are “totally” sedentary. We have become a nation of sitters and riders.
One of the things my wife and I wanted when we decided to move back to America was to live in a manageably sized town within walking distance of a central business district. Hanover, where we settled, is a small, typical New England town, pleasant, sedate, and compact. It has a broad central green surrounded by the venerable buildings of Dartmouth College, a trim Main Street, and leafy residential streets. It is, in short, an agreeable, easy place to go about one’s business on foot, and yet as far as I can tell almost no one does.
I walk to town nearly every day when I am at home. I go to the post office or library or bookstore, and sometimes, if I am feeling particularly debonair, I stop at Rosey Jekes Cafe for a cappuccino. Occasionally in the evenings my wife and I stroll up to the Nugget Theater for a movie or to Murphy’s for a beer. All this is a big part of my life and I wouldn’t dream of doing it other than on foot. People have gotten used to this curious and eccentric behavior now, but several times in the early days passing acquaintances would slow by the curb and ask if I wanted a ride.
“But I’m going your way,” they would insist when I politely declined. “Really, it’s no bother.”
“Honestly, I enjoy walking.”
“Well, if you’re absolutely sure,” they would say and depart reluctantly, even guiltily, as if leaving the scene of an accident without giving their name.
People have become so habituated to using the car for everything that it would never occur to them to unfurl their legs and see what those lower limbs can do. It is worth noting that 93 percent of all trips outside the property in the United States now involve the use of a car.
As with most old New England towns designed for another age of transportation, Hanover isn’t a particularly obliging place for cars. Nearly any visit to town by automobile will be characterized by a long and exasperating hunt for a parking space. To alleviate this, the local authoriti
es are forever widening roads to speed traffic flow and building new parking lots— Dartmouth recently tore down an unexceptionable old hospital building in order to insert into the heart of the campus a couple of more acres of numbingly soulless parking lot—failing to understand that it is the absence of these features that makes the town desirable in the first place.
But it isn’t really the authorities who are to blame. It is the people who wish to take two tons of metal with them wherever they go. We have reached an age where college students expect to drive between classes, where parents will get in a car and drive three blocks to pick up their children from a friend’s house, where the mailman takes his van up and down every driveway on a street. We will go through the most extraordinary contortions to save ourselves twenty feet of walking.
Sometimes it’s almost ludicrous. The other day I was in the little nearby town of Etna waiting to bring home one of my children from a piano lesson when a car stopped outside the local post office and a man about my age popped out and dashed inside (and left the engine running—something else that exercises me inordinately). He was inside for about three or four minutes, then came out, got in the car, and drove exactly sixteen feet (I had nothing better to do so I paced it off) to the general store next door, and popped in again, engine still running.
And the thing is, this man looked really fit. I’m sure he jogs extravagant distances and plays squash and does all kinds of exuberantly healthful things, but I am just as sure that he drives to each of these undertakings. It’s crazy. An acquaintance of ours was complaining the other day about the difficulty of finding a place to park outside the local gymnasium. She goes there several times a week to walk on a treadmill. The gymnasium is, at most, a six-minute walk from her front door. I asked her why she didn’t walk to the gym and do six minutes less on the treadmill.