The Folly of Greenlandia

Aerial view of Fordlândia, photo by the Ford Motor Company, 1934.

Last month when I was writing about Rubber, I learned about Fordlândia, a rubber plantation/utopia that Henry Ford built in the Brazilian jungle. My word count for that post was too high, so I left out the story. But it’s been rattling around in my head ever since, pinballing to the top every time I read another story about this administration’s obsession with Greenland. Plus, that Santayana quote, the mantra of historians, constantly reminds me to study the lessons of the past. Anybody remember maps which referred to the Belgian Congo? Ever hear of Minimata disease?

Corporations and governments–that is, corporations whose security adopts uniforms and carries a flag–often get the bright idea to get resources cheaply from places where the scrutiny is lax. Of course, corporations and governments aren’t entities unto themselves. It’s the leaders who come up with cockamamie schemes of exploration and exploitation, schemes which lead to environmental devastation, mutilations, genocide. Often, costs vastly outweigh the benefits.

I realize that the moral reprehensibility of those first three evils ought to sway the argument against exploitation, but there’s no moral reasoning, sometimes, with corporations, which suddenly become faceless when there is wrongdoing. I was nurtured at a tender age on cost-benefit analysis, and I sometimes find it makes a persuasive argument when other arguments won’t do. In that spirit, I’d like to offer a few examples from history as reason to pause before we start invading and strip-mining Greenland.

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Mom’s China

“I can’t find the rest of these crystal glasses,” KK says, lying on the kitchen floor, one arm buried deep in a cabinet. There are rattling noises, and she keeps shining her phone’s flashlight deep into the Underworld of our kitchenware. “This is all the Rosenthal stuff.”

Two pieces of the remaining Rosenthal set. All photos by kajmeister, exc. Wedgwood medallion.

My mom received a set of Rosenthal china as a wedding present. When she died in 1997, I ended up with it. Most of it I stored, but I kept a platter out among our other fancy buffet dishes. A few holidays ago, when it was pulled out for use, the platter cracked neatly in half, which has made me loathe to use any other pieces.

As we were making Thanksgiving turkey and trimmings this year, pulling out the special bowl to mix stuffing and another bowl to sport cranberries, I realized that there’s a big gap between what I would use for a dinner party and what my mom would use. Not that strange these days, of course, my kids would say, “dinner party, WTF?” But the idea of hauling out a single set of matching delicate dishes for a meal seems bizarre, even on a special holiday with people you care about.

There is a history for things like Rosenthal china, a company history and a personal history. These things intersect and create waves of overlapping interference, like in a pond. This may explain why we have such a patchwork quilt of dishes when we serve dinner, all of which are precious.

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Go to College, If Only Because It Makes Looking at Data More Fun

Higher Education, photo of the Campanile at CAL by kajmeister.

If you had studied Economics, you would know why giving substantial tax breaks beginning in the 1990s for 4-year undergraduate degrees ultimately raised the prices of 4-year undergraduate degrees. If you had studied Communication Studies, you’d be able to spot the rhetorical fallacies of Ivy League graduates who now grouse about the decline of education. You’d know that the Wall Street Journal’s college ranking system based on ROIs uses circular logic. If you’d studied Statistics, you’d wonder why journalists only refer to data showing the last five years, and you’d quickly learn that “public confidence” is not the cause of the decline in enrollment. English major? you’d see how different motivations drive people’s choices. Gender or Multilcultural studies? You’d notice the change in who graces the mastheads of universities today. College is useful for a lot of reasons.

There has been a bunch of — academics might say a “plethora” — of articles recently whining about how people have decided college is a bad idea, how careerism is ruining college, and how it’s just no good (or fun) anymore. I beg to differ.

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