The Reticulator

Sunday afternoon I listened to a horrible book on an otherwise nice bike ride. The book was “The John Deere Way: Performance that Endures” by David Magee.

John Deere has always had a positive image in my mind, at least until yesterday. Hearing an old Johnny Popper will bring back good memories from when I was a kid; even more so for my wife, who was raised on an Iowa farm where she sometimes drove one. A toy-sized John Deere tractor has an honored place in our bedroom, even if it isn’t the type of Model B that she had on the farm. John Deere makes good, though not inexpensive, lawn tractors.

People put signs like this in their yards. I saw two of them yesterday, one at a working farm, and the other at a former farmstead. I understand.

But unfortunately the name John Deere is now going to be associated in my mind with that book. It supposedly was written by an independent author, not a corporate flack. Perhaps it’s a good thing, because your average corporate PR drone probably could not stomach his/her craft taken to such an extreme.

I don’t know what point size was used in the written version, but I’ll bet it set a record for the most corporate platitudes per square inch, most of them repeated over and over again. There were phrases delivered straight, like “John Deere works to deliver higher productivity,” “commitment to products,” “founding tenets: quality, innovation, integrity, commitment,” and “striking design and bold new power in tractors.” For informative content, we are given things like, “[John Deere] was first to add pride to productivity for farmers.”

The phrase, “for example” is used several times in the book, but is never followed by anything very true-to-life and not obviously vetted by the top corporate levels. Early in the book we learned that a lot of Deere employees stay with the company a long time. We are told the younger ones learn by example from the older ones, but we are not given an example of how that really works.

A tiny bit of useful information leaked out when the author/corporate message contradicted itself. We learn that John Deere carried many of its customers through the bad years of the Depression, and that it has a history of supporting its dealers through bad times when they have unsold inventory. But while we’re told about continuity and the original core values of business, and how “the new has built on strengths of the old,” we also learn that the very newest way of this decade is basically turning the old on its head. The company is now going to emphasize the return to shareholders, and that means no more providing interest-free loans to dealers, and basically no more Mr. Nice Guy. It’s going the way of most large corporations in the current environment. I can’t begrudge John Deere for having to go a new direction, but it would be nice if the corporate line, channeled through David Magee, was not about how there is a John Deere way.

John Deere can be thankful that most people will never even hear of this sycophantic book.

What does this photo have to do with Anna Karenina, you may ask? (Or not.)

The photo is from last weekend’s bike ride, and is also posted over at The Spokesrider. I was listening to Liza Knapp’s lecture on Giants of Russian literature while slogging into the wind on the day I took that photo, but that isn’t exactly the connection I had in mind.

What I was thinking of was the part where Knapp describes Anna’s death. Anna made the sign of the cross just before her suicide under a train, and it was a redemptive moment. The act of making the sign brought back a flood of connections from her youth, and she asked forgiveness in that moment.

Although I’m a Lutheran Christian, I do not go in for making the sign of the cross, or a whole bunch of other ritualistic and ceremonial stuff other than the two sacraments. And I probably wouldn’t do those if they weren’t a direct command. I was brought up in more of a puritanistic version of protestantism that avoided emphasis on external rituals and ceremonies. I didn’t encounter the more liturgical type of Lutheranism until college.

But I find it fascinating how our religion is very materialistic, and not exclusively spiritual. There are material things like bread and wine in the sacraments. We’re taught to pray for daily bread. We’ve taken a technological invention (writing) and made something sacred out of it.

And Liza Knopp’s explanation of that part of Tolstoi’s work showed me another connection between the material and the sacred. I don’t think I’ll start making the sign of the cross myself at this point in my life, but I can now be more than merely tolerant of those who do it, and respect what such actions can do.

I do not know if Liza Knopp is a Christian, but she certainly has a good understanding of the Christian aspects of Doestoevsky, Tolstoi, and (in a way) Chekov. (I’m just now getting to her lectures on Chekov.) I wish I had had her as a literature instructor back when I was in college — a Lutheran college. The instructors I had were good enough, but she has some insights that would have been a great addition to the kind of religious education a college like mine was trying to provide. (I still am grumpy about the fact that I never learned about C.S. Lewis until years after I graduated. I should have learned about him and his type of apologetics in college. And now I’m learning from Liza Knopp about other things I should have learned then. But better late than never, etc.)

Oh, I almost forgot to explain the connection with an Amish small engine shop. Well, the sign is one that maybe can correct a common misconception about the Amish and technology. The Amish aren’t against technology. They are always adopting new technologies. But they are very careful and deliberate about it — careful about the effect they may have on family, social, and spiritual life. That’s where the connection is. It’s another arena in which a material thing  (in this case a gasoline engine) has an impact on spiritual life.

Jonathan Zittrain, author of “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It,”  doesn’t like closed-system devices like the iPhone.  (Network World article here.)

In a way I don’t like it, either.  But isn’t the computer industry following a trajectory parallel to that of others, such as the automotive industry?   Once upon a time there was a place for dozens of small-time car manufacturers, just as once upon a time there was a place for kitchen-table computer software companies.  In both industries, there were consolidations, buyouts, washouts, until only a few big ones were left.  Once upon a time cars were made of parts that were bolted together, and an entrepreneur or even a lone customer with enough money could design something different.  A shade-tree mechanic could make his own bearings.  But then we got unibodies and integrated systems which were less amenable to tinkering.  Isn’t that similar to what’s happening with iPhones?  Cars are now commodities.  One can even buy used ones with far less tire-kicking and under the hood inspection than was needed in the old days.  An iPhone is the computer version of that.  It just works — no assembly required.

The Reticulator took the blog verbosity test, and here is the result:

Created by OnePlusYou

It says my posts are 81 percent shorter than the average blogger.  But how short is the average blogger? Wikipedia says the average male in the U.S. is 5’9.3″ short, and the average female is 5’3.8″ short. But what about bloggers? How do they compare to the rest of the population?

Or did it mean to say, “My posts are 81 percent shorter than those of the average blogger?” I suppose not, because that would be 20 percent more verbose.

I never thought I’d see the old trend reversed, but here it is. Good for Newsweek.

Mr. Meacham said that since he took over, Newsweek has 30% more text and fewer pictures.

WSJ: “What’s next for newsmagazines?“