Drawn in the s and s, the books introduce children to modern life and, especially, to all the variety of things that moms and dads and other people do in modern societies. In doing so, they paint a richly revealing picture of life in a technological society, one which more clearly than any scientific textbook opens a window onto the world that COVID has laid bare. The coal mine is on the page before. And for the most part, what people do all day turns out to be making technology work.
Diane the cat drives the train. Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is full of gas station attendants, car washers, traffic cops, road construction crews, oil truck drivers, lane marker painters, stop sign installers, Mistress Mouse and her auto repair tow truck, ambulance drivers, snow plow drivers, tank crews, and everyone else who helps make it possible for the rest of us to get in our cars and go from one place to another.
Nor are workers the only ones making technology—and technological society—go. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the first electrical engineering curriculum in , the same year that Thomas Edison opened his first commercial electrical power plant. And ordinary, everyday people make these systems go too. Down the street from the power plant, momma fox vacuums, daddy cooks on the backyard electric barbecue, and the kids watch TV upstairs with Lowly Worm. In Cars and Trucks and Things That Go , every single vehicle is being driven by somebody with somewhere to go: taxi dog driving the foxes to the airport, fireman cat driving the engine to the fire, mail cat driving his mail van, lady fox driving her roadster, miss kitty in her kitty camper, and of course the pigs and the rabbits headed on family road trips.
We are, in deep ways, no longer human, in some biologically meaningful sense. We are techno-human, part and parcel of the great infrastructural systems that organize life in the twenty-first century. The characters in Busytown are living their ordinary lives: working at the power plant, writing a letter to grandma, having a baby, going shopping and on trips, training for military service, getting tonsils taken out, keeping the streets crime-free, putting out fires, selling their goods at market.
What Scarry illuminates for us is that today, all these activities are thoroughly structured by, infused with, and interconnected via technology. We are codependent with our technologies. We design and organize them, and we make them work. They in turn make us who we are. They shape how we work and play. They allow us to imagine and accomplish things that would otherwise be unattainable.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. We got amazing seats. The first Mezzanine, front row. We could have high fived the characters if they reached for us. Jett was totally mesmerized and was really enthusiastic about the clapping. Katie kept asking about the light up wands. What are those? Where do we get them? Is that far away? These interpretive glosses are supported by our findings, but can we make sense of the scheme as a whole?
Let us arrange the major classifications in a Durkheimian schema…Fig. The order of animals is stretched into a U-shape. Animals at the bottom of the U may be considered to be dominated, animals on top dominating. As we shall see, while there is a logic to the horizontal placement of species, it is not to be interpreted as a single latent dimension. Note that Table 5 demonstrates that the vertical dimension here correlates quite well with the percent of the species that are professionals, who have authority, and who have skilled jobs….
And so on. But to those of us who have not had the good fortune to end up as sociologists, the Busytown books are far less theoretically rich. Looking out from it, I get roughly the same perspective on my city as one gets reading a Scarry book.
And so I see a similar, though slightly darker, version of urban life. The UPS man delivers the packages. The beer truck unloads the beer. The flower seller opens the flower shop. The police officer frisks a youth. The drunk couple shout at each other. Just as when you say a word over and over it loses all meaning and becomes bizarre, watching the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker from 30 feet up the perspective of a god, though a minor one , one begins to see the rhythm rather than the people.
And the rhythm is so consistent, even if there are minor variations the package on this doorstep rather than that, gleeful drunks rather than angry drunks , that it almost feels as if we have no free will at all, that everything runs as a sort of clockwork.
Then, of course, something unusual happens, and people become people again. A parade, a block party, an accident. If you watched long enough, though, those too would begin to seem routine.
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