Posts Tagged ‘Royal Navy’
“Bureaucracies… are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity”*…
Jumping through hoops for the sake of the hoops…
Not long ago, a New York City data analyst who had been laid off shortly after the pandemic hit told me she had filed for unemployment-insurance payments and then spent the next six months calling, emailing, and using social media to try to figure out why the state’s Labor Department would not send her the money she was owed.
A mother in Philadelphia living below the poverty line told me about her struggle to maintain government aid. Disabled herself and caring for a disabled daughter, she had not gotten all of her stimulus checks and, because she does not regularly file taxes or use a computer, needed help from a legal-aid group to make sure she would get the newly expanded child-tax-credit payments.
A Colorado systems administrator with a chronic medical condition told me that switching jobs had caused an accidental lapse in his health coverage, which led to a cascade of paperwork over responsibility for a medical bill. He estimated that he had spent 100 hours resolving the issue…
In my decade-plus of social-policy reporting, I have mostly understood these stories as facts of life. Government programs exist. People have to navigate those programs. That is how it goes. But at some point, I started thinking about these kinds of administrative burdens as the “time tax”—a levy of paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens in exchange for benefits that putatively exist to help them. This time tax is a public-policy cancer, mediating every American’s relationship with the government and wasting countless precious hours of people’s time.
The issue is not that modern life comes with paperwork hassles. The issue is that American benefit programs are, as a whole, difficult and sometimes impossible for everyday citizens to use. Our public policy is crafted from red tape, entangling millions of people who are struggling to find a job, failing to feed their kids, sliding into poverty, or managing a disabling health condition.
The United States government—whether controlled by Democrats, with their love of too-complicated-by-half, means-tested policy solutions; or Republicans, with their love of paperwork-as-punishment; or both, with their collective neglect of the implementation and maintenance of government programs—has not just given up on making benefits easy to understand and easy to receive. It has in many cases purposefully made the system difficult, shifting the burden of public administration onto individuals and discouraging millions of Americans from seeking aid. The government rations public services through perplexing, unfair bureaucratic friction. And when people do not get help designed for them, well, that is their own fault.
The time tax is worse for individuals who are struggling than for the rich; larger for Black families than for white families; harder on the sick than on the healthy. It is a regressive filter undercutting every progressive policy we have. In America, losing a job means making a hundred phone calls to a state unemployment-insurance system. Getting hit by a car means becoming your own hospital-billing expert. Having a disability means launching into a Jarndyce v. Jarndyce–type legal battle. Needing help to feed a toddler means filling out a novel-length application for aid.
The Biden administration is expanding the welfare state, through the new child tax credit and other initiatives. Congressional Democrats are crafting a new New Deal. But little attention is being paid to making things work, rather than making them exist. And very little attention is being paid to making things work for the neediest—people short on time, money, and mental bandwidth.
The time tax needs to be measured. It needs to be managed. And it needs to end…
Why is so much American bureaucracy left to average citizens? Annie Lowrey (@AnnieLowrey) explains the enormous cost and points to the remedy: “The Time Tax.”
* David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
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As we sign on to streamlining, we might recall that this date in 1970 was “Black Tot Day,” the last day on which the British Royal Navy issued sailors with a daily rum ration (the daily tot). In the 17th century, the ration had been beer– one gallon per day– but the the switch was meade the following century to rum in order to cut down on the weight and volume necessary to carry to meet that requirement. The daily allowance was steadily reduced thereafter, until finally it was eliminated.
And so, on July 31, 1970, the last tot was poured as usual at 6 bells in the forenoon watch (11am) after the pipe of “up spirits.” Some sailors wore black armbands, tots were “buried at sea,” and in one navy training camp, HMS Collingwood, the Royal Naval Electrical College at Fareham in Hampshire, there was a mock funeral procession complete with black coffin and accompanying drummers and piper. The move was not popular with the ratings (enlisted personnel), despite an extra can of beer being added to their daily rations in compensation.
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were”*…
Detail: The Blue Boat (1892) by Winslow Homer
Coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688, ‘nostalgia’ referred to a medical condition – homesickness – characterised by an incapacitating longing for one’s motherland. Hofer favoured the term because it combined two essential features of the illness: the desire to return home (nostos) and the pain (algos) of being unable to do so. Nostalgia’s symptomatology was imprecise – it included rumination, melancholia, insomnia, anxiety and lack of appetite – and was thought to affect primarily soldiers and sailors. Physicians also disagreed about its cause. Hofer thought that nostalgia was caused by nerve vibrations where traces of ideas of the motherland ‘still cling’, whereas others, noticing that it was found predominantly among Swiss soldiers fighting at lower altitudes, proposed instead that nostalgia was caused by changes in atmospheric pressure, or eardrum damage from the clanging of Swiss cowbells. Once nostalgia was identified among soldiers from various nationalities, the idea that it was geographically specific was abandoned.
By the early 20th century, nostalgia was considered a psychiatric rather than neurological illness – a variant of melancholia. Within the psychoanalytic tradition, the object of nostalgia – ie, what the nostalgic state is about – was dissociated from its cause. Nostalgia can manifest as a desire to return home, but – according to psychoanalysts – it is actually caused by the traumatic experience of being removed from one’s mother at birth. This account began to be questioned in the 1940s, with nostalgia once again linked to homesickness. ‘Home’ was now interpreted more broadly to include not only concrete places, such as a childhood town, but also abstract ones, such as past experiences or bygone moments. While disagreements lingered, by the second part of the 20th century, nostalgia began to be characterised as involving three components. The first was cognitive: nostalgia involves the retrieval of autobiographical memories. The second, affective: nostalgia is considered a debilitating, negatively valenced emotion. And third, conative: nostalgia comprises a desire to return to one’s homeland. As I’ll argue, however, this tripartite characterisation of nostalgia is likely wrong.
First, two clarifications: nostalgia is neither pathological nor beneficial….
In the past few years, we’ve seen a resurgence of nationalistic political movements that have gained traction by way of promoting a return to the ‘good old days’: ‘Make America Great Again’ in the US, or ‘We Want Our Country Back’ in the UK. These politics of nostalgia promote the implementation of policies that, supposedly, would return nations to times in which people were better off. Unsurprisingly, such politics are usually heralded by conservative groups who, in the past, tended to be better off than they currently are – independently of the particular politics of the time. In a 2016 study conducted by the Polish social psychologists Monika Prusik and Maria Lewicka, a large sample of Poles were asked nostalgia-related questions about how things were prior to the fall of communism 25 years earlier. The results revealed that people felt much more nostalgic and had more positive feelings about the communist government if they were better off then than now, if they were older, and if they were currently unhappy. Doubtlessly, older and conservative-leaning folk who perceive their past – whether accurately or not – as better than their present account for a significant portion of the electorate supporting nationalistic movements. But we’d be misled to think of them as the primary engine, let alone the majority. For the Polish results show something very different: a large number of younger individuals avidly supporting nostalgic policies that would return their nations to a past they never experienced…
Neuroscience is finding what propaganda has long known: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories – an imagined past works too: “Nostalgia Reimagined.”
* Marcel Proust
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As we we muse over our madeleines, we might recall that this date in 1970 was “Black Tot Day,” the last day on which the British Royal Navy issued sailors with a daily rum ration (the daily tot). In the 17th century, the ration had been beer– one gallon per day– but the the switch was meade the following century to rum in order to cut down on the weight and volume necessary to carry to meet that requirement. The daily allowance was steadily reduced thereafter, until finally it was eliminated.
And so, on July 31, 1970, the last tot was poured as usual at 6 bells in the forenoon watch (11am) after the pipe of “up spirits.” Some sailors wore black armbands, tots were “buried at sea,” and in one navy training camp, HMS Collingwood, the Royal Naval Electrical College at Fareham in Hampshire, there was a mock funeral procession complete with black coffin and accompanying drummers and piper. The move was not popular with the ratings (enlisted personnel), despite an extra can of beer being added to their daily rations in compensation.
Measuring out the tot (diorama aboard HMS Belfast)
Now you don’t…
Camouflage– cryptic coloration– is common in the majority of species that have lived on earth; but military camouflage is a relatively recent development. Through the early 19th Century, almost all soldiers tended to dress in bright colors chosen precisely to make them more identifiable on the battlefield; it was during World War I that camouflage found common use.
The earliest military camouflage drew on the work of zoologist and artist Abbott Thayer, applying lessons from the animal kingdom to secreting troops and tanks.
But World War I was as importantly a naval war. Norman Wilkinson, a marine painter [and your correspondent’s relatively distant ancestor] who was in the Royal Navy, is credited with being the first to develop camouflage for ships– “dazzle,” a kind of camouflage that is “disruptive” like zebra’s stripes. The Royal Navy allowed him to test his idea; and when the test went well, Wilkinson was told to proceed… but was given no office space. So he went to his alma mater, the Royal Academy, and was given a classroom. Wilkinson hired Vorticist Edward Wadsworth to be a port officer in Liverpool, England and to oversee the painting of dazzle ships. In 1918, Wilkinson came to United States to share his dazzle plans. 1,000 plans were developed through this partnership.
One of Wilkinson’s U.S. collaborators was Maurice L. Freedman, the district camoufleur for the 4th district of the U.S. Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corporation (a precursor to today’s Merchant Marine). Maurice’s job was to take the plans, adjust them if necessary, then hire painters (artists, house painters) to paint the ships accordingly.
Freedman, who attended the Rhode Island School of Design after the war, donated the plans and photos in his collection to the Fleet Library at RISD. Now (through the end of March) those plans are on display at the library– and online.
As we dress discretely, we might recall that it was on this date in 1258 that (a decidedly un-camouflaged) Hulagu Khan (a grandson of Genghis) and his Mongol force sacked Baghdad, and brought the Abbasid Caliphate (source of, among other marvels, algebra) to an end.
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