The Problem With Stories About Mine Disasters

This week, I've been hearing a lot about coal mining. Amanda recently read 'Germinal', Zola's epic story about coal mining in Second Empire France, and wrote a beautiful review of it. More than that, there has been a disaster in the coal mines here in America, that already has left several dead and wounded, and the chances don't look good for the rest of them.

Mining is actually a subject that I've been interested in for some time (I'd like to say this is because I'm a nice, humanitarian person, but unfortunately it's more selfish than that - the book-I-am-writing-but-will-never-finish draws on mining pretty heavily). From a metaphorical perspective, there is something powerful about it, something almost ressurectional in these groups of men and women descending down into the ground every day then rising up at the end, drawing their living directly from the breast of Mother Earth by main force. Before the industrial revolution, mining had an air of superstitious wickedness to it. Mining was a job in many communities for those outcast from real society, frequently even the work of slaves. And, the product? Well, Pluto and Hades were the patron gods of the riches drawn up from the earth, and the connection with Satan took a very long time to dissapear.

Of course, mining is the very lifeblood of our economy now, particularly coal mining. If it were to stop, if we were to shut down all mines our economy would quickly fall apart. Our lights would turn off, our factories would stop, all the complex, delicate web of modern civilization would dissapear.

Which makes disasters like the one this week even more painful to me. Like the image of Moloch in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, we, the 'overlanders' as it were, send human souls into the mouth of destruction, as a sacrifice to appease the gods of modern living. This is, it seems to us, unavoidable. Much like car accidents, mine accidents are simply a part of life, something tragic but that one expects will happen, simply because someone must keep the coal-fires burning. Sad, but almost banal in it's sadness. Another mine disaster, that's so unfortunate, man that'd be scary. A 5 minute byline on the news. A dramatic rescue, or a moment of sorrow when they find the bodies.

This is made worse for me because - and understand, please, that I don't believe this is intentional - of the way we cover these stories in America, because in the way we cover a mine disaster, one begins to see the outlines of the way that we protect ourselves from the horror of the system surrounding them. This morning on NPR, for instance, the story came on that they're still looking for these miners. A byline comes up about the awful safety record of the miners, and then a long description of a meeting 2 weeks ago of industry professionals, union leaders, and journalists, where they more or less celebrated how safe mining has become, how last year was the safest year ever of mining in America. The pathos of this was fully explored, the feeling that, yes, these people were sincere, EVERYBODY figured that disasters like happened at the Sago mine in Utah a few years ago were behind us as a country. Everyone was shocked when they heard the news. Everyone, of course, being those that were flown to Washington to drink and celebrate how damned nice we all are for trying to make sure miners don't get killed. The mining industry journalist they spoke to was devastated by the news, shocked.

How shocked can the owners have been? The owners who kept sending down miners into a mine so hopped up with coal dust and methane gas that they had more than citation per day last year. They were fined $900,000 last year for violations of safety codes. Of course, the problem is, that it is economically viable to run a mine fast and loose on safety rules, and just pay those fines. Safety, they say, takes time. Safety is important, but must be balanced with productivity. The company is only trying to stay competitive in a difficult market. The company is doing nothing that is too far out of band for the industry, and they've vastly improved over the last few years.

And the painful thing is (and again, I know there are reasons for this), I listened to a lot of running time talking to these mining experts, and how sometimes circumstances come together in unforeseen ways (yeah, I loved that one - see, yeah, methane + coal dust + oxygen + spark = boom. There, now you can 'foresee' it next time, jerks), and how they just don't understand how this could happen, and they're heartbroken. But then, there is only a few minutes, where they apologize for not notifying the families of the dead that they found the bodies of their loved ones. There is just a few minutes listening to mining families say 'yeah, well, we send him down every day knowing he might not come back up, but you just sort of have to get used to that. That's how it is, he's a miner.' The story on our nightly news yesterday shows these vague, indistinct images, taken from a helicopter, of a lot of people milling around a hole in the ground with machines. The horror, in all this, is that we were surprised, the story seems to say, that we really meant well, but it just didn't work out.

That's not the horror at all. This isn't a story about how good intentions go awry. It's a story about what happens when a spark hits fire and instantaneously entombs the living souls of men we take advantage of in order to have our lights turn on in the morning. It's a story about horror and isolation and the endless, endless dark, and desperately scrabbling for the emergency food and gas masks, and sitting under the ground waiting, waiting, for days you can't even count anymore, for hopefully someone to come for you. It's the story of sitting on the surface, watching a machine drill holes into the ground because the place where maybe, hopefully, their best guesses say, your husband, wife, son is is so full of methane that it isn't safe for rescuers to go on. It's the story of crawling around in half-collapsed passages, looking for your friends who are probably dead, calling into empty chasms, trying to hear in every creak of a pipe and echo of air  and metallic tapping some little morse code saying what you are increasingly sure isn't so, that you are not just digging up a corpse so it can be reburied somewhere else.

But there's a problem, there, and the problem is that in a mining story, there is a we and there is a them. Them is the miners, and we feel for them. We are the listeners, though, and the media speaks to our concerns, our needs, our worries. And it reflects our feelings, the vague sense of othering the incomprehensible, so that we can find a way to emerge still able to forget to turn off the light, and not feel that we've extracted the blood of some far off soul as a recompense for our carelessness. So, we talk about our story, the story of not being able to comprehend how awful it must be, the story of wondering how this happened, of not being able to comprehend how those distant someone's who must of caused this couldn't have been controlled by the regulators or congress, or whatever. And then, at the end, the story fades out over the sound of melancholy bluegrass music, the music of 'them', those poor guys far off who are dying (it's even worse when it's a Chinese mining disaster - those we hardly even notice, despite the mines powering our desire for fully stocked Walmarts). And we feel sad for them, and this sadness gratifies us, it is our sacrifice - it's all we know HOW to sacrifice.


There will be, now, a great deal of talk about resolving the underlying issues in mining. Talk will center on the amorphous word 'regulations', and 'stiffer penalties'. Talk is already surfacing calling these miners heroes, sacrificing themselves bravely for the greater good. But, none of this talk looks at the root issues. I am not an expert in mining, but from the outside, here is the problems that I see.

1) First and foremost, mining is a capitalist industry, and in capitalism, the only truly effective impediment to bad behaviour is the machinations of the market. And in this case, the coal industry, from a safety point of view, is more or less insulated from market effects. The market does a fine job of regulating price (assuming the presence of strong anti-trust regulation), and it has been very effective at this in terms of coal (too effective perhaps, which I'll talk about in a minute). But, the only way 'soft' issues like safety and ethics are regulated by a market are by offending the sensibilities of your customers. Well, unfortunately, you or I have no choice as to whom to buy coal from. We simply get power. Their 'customers' are big power companies, who, of course, have no control over the coal companies they will say, and therefore can't be responsible for the ethics of their suppliers. This isn't to say Adam Smith was wrong - simply Adam Smith assumed that cost/benefit could be measured. And it's pretty difficult to measure the cost of a human life. After all, the direct cost of someone in West Virginia dying, to me, the consumer, is pretty darned low, really. I have no idea how to fix this. The best solution we've come up with in the past for this sort of thing, is extremely heavy regulation - basically forcing the industry to do what we as a country think is right.

2) Coal is too cheap. It is very easy to just look at the bosses and say 'those bastards, what were they thinking?' But, the problem is, they are right in a sense - what they are doing isn't abnormal, and it would be difficult for them to be profitable on a large scale WITHOUT a 'gradual' approach to safety. They need to produce, and safety slows production. The problem is, ironically, that we demand cheap power on our side of the equation (and other countries are providing it with no particular concerns as to the safety of miners). When we demand cheap power, it must be produced cheaply. For it to be produced cheaply, there must be a plentiful, cheap supply of consumables. This pushes the market for coal down, speeding the frenzy for production, leaving less time for safety. This is what gets forgotten in debates, for instance, about renewable energy - yes renewable energy is more expensive in dollars, but that's because we don't figure the actual price of a coal-fired power plant, largely because much of the cost is immeasurable (don't even get me started on the 'cost' of pollution). If we were paying as much as we OUGHT to pay for coal-generated electricity, there would be a lot less power use, a lot fewer dead coal iners - and unfortunately a lot of angry constituents complaining to their congressmen, and a lot of people dying of heat stroke and hypothermia because they can't afford to run their heat/ac.

3) We, as citizens, are blind to the production process, and no longer have to worry about where our stuff comes from. This has been true, of course, throughout much of history, but the problem now is that, really, the mine disasters in West Virginia are only the tip of the iceberg. True, crushing, murderous poverty is now outsourced to other countries in the name of development and industrial growth, so, like I said if I we aired every dead miner in China, we'd spend a lot of time looking at dead miners (and dead industrial workers, and dead children from breathing in factory smoke, and dead rivers from being dumped into, and a whole lot of blood that goes into our happy meal toys). These things, though, are far away, now, and not our fault - it's not OUR fault, after all, that the Chinese government doesn't regulate it's industry, right? But again, this is the irony of the American position. We worked hard for years to spread the free market economy to the world, as the harbinger of freedom and opportunity. And then, when the market is unable to regulate human rights and ethics, we just shake our heads and figure those countries just aren't free enough.

Again, I don't mean this to be a diatribe. I do not know what the solution to these things is. I just don't know. I do know that in the meantime, we wake up each morning and ask human beings to get out of bed and hurl themselves into complex, devious murder machines, and then fret and feel confused when the blades draw one or two of them in and hack them to bits. Maybe, we say, maybe they just need a little thicker leather suit. Maybe they just need to be taught how to hurl themselves in properly. Maybe we need to move the blades a little so they aren't pointed directly at their vital organs. Maybe. Sure. Or maybe we need to work together to find a way to stop hurling men to their death.

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Luna, Manchester, and Why Political Correctness IS Important

(Warning: This review makes occasional use of 'the f-word'. I don't use it OFTEN in life, but once in a while it finds it's way in. Sorry if I offend :/)

I recently read Luna, a book about about a transsexual girl - originally I had intended to write a more extensive conversation about it, but I don't think I could do so while maintaining my composure entirely (it was that good). And nobody needs that. I will only say that it was a beautiful book - it has it's faults, but fuck that, because it was beautiful and made me feel more awake than many a far more 'perfect' book. I don't know if it will affect everyone the same, but it did for me.

That being said, and my little store of comabtiveness being worn out...

I've actually had a number of places lately where I've been in contact with liminal things - those things which are neither this nor that, one thing or the other in our mind, and it has made me thoughtful on the idea.

Let me start with something that isn't as emotionally charged for us now: Victorian Manchester.

Manchester

Having just started a history of Manchester (Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Half-Known City, by Gary S. Messinger), but having long been fascinated by the city, I found one of the early statements he makes very intriguing. Manchester (if you're not familiar with it's history) was the world's first truly industrial city, the first city that was built entirely around factories and industrial production (during the Industrial Revolution of early 19th century England). The city was a sort of shorthand for the horrors of modern living, as a result, for most of the Victorian period. And with good reason - people there lived in dire poverty, the rivers stank of chemicals and shone strange colors, the air was mired in endless smoke, the people were a mishmash of displaced immigrants, and the city government was forever trying to deal with problems it simply could not understand. This was early 19th century England - 'city' meant London, a mercantile city resting largely on the arms of merchants and tradesman, containing a (literally) medieval governmental structure. Manchester was something different, and it took a long time for people to find a paradigm to understand it:

Growth [in Industrial Manchester] posed fundamental problems of perception.... Educated Englishmen could have cited ancient Athens and Rome as more impressive than Manchester on all counts. Even easier were comparisons with the cities of the Low Countries... [or] London. Nevertheless contemporaries could find no complete precedent for Manchester.
To the present-day historian the reasons for this perplexity are clear. A modern observer can see that Manchester was the first predominantly industrial city in the history of the world... Contemporaries, of course, could not view matters in this perspective. But they did sense that Manchester's growth posed a challenge.

This challenge was, in many ways, a challenge of naming. People did not know what industry WAS, because they did not have the vocabulary we have now: simple words like 'blue collar workers' and 'urban growth'. Even words like 'industry', and 'wealth' had meanings that simply were not equipped to deal with these huge changes (consider that 'the spinning industry' pre-industrial revolution was something women did in the evenings in their homes, to earn extra money for their families, and a wooden spinning wheel was a complex, expensive piece of machinery).

The results of this phase shift are too complex to list hear, but they were deeply coloured by fear. Consider this is the period of the Luddites, who tried to destroy the machinery because it made it too easy to produce goods, reducing labor costs, for example. When the thing was an unnamed, belching smoke and displacing cultures, the thing was a monster, eating the green fields of England even as it bankrolled the empire. William Blake epitomized his horror in one of his poems, written as he calls for a struggle to return England to a state of New Jerusalem:

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

That which is unknown and new is evil. The Faustian connection with science, progress and discovery is as old as the hills, and continues to hold resonance today (name me a movie about cloning that approaches the subject differently than a movie might approach a demon...). It was only, later, when we as a world had lived with the thing long enough to know it and to name it, and to learn what we meant with the name, that we could accept the new thing, and make it into something at least LESS disorderly. And in the end, industrialization has certainly had it's faults, but people live longer, more comfortably, and with a greater degree of equality than they did before the 'dark Satanic Mills' sprang up.

Before this could happen, though, people had to make a human, intuitive relationship with their new world. All the science, all the reason, all the evidence of the world couldn't win out UNTIL people had words and thoughts and history to understand themselves with.

Which is not to demean the science, reason and evidence - after all that's wher ethe words, thoughts and history CAME from. The industrialisation of England was accompanied by education - often feared and opposed by those in power, but in the end inevitable, and powerful. Common workers, put together in a small space, could take classes, discuss the world, come up with ideas, and make decisions about things larger than their own house. And for all that factory owners frequently feared that an educated populace was a cauldron of discontent, it was education that eventually saved the factories from public hatred. Education, after all, taught people to write and spell the names they had created, and taught them what the names meant.

Calpernia Addams

So, I know, that's oversimplifying a very complex issue, but turn now with to an (equally) complex issue that is more contemporary. In 1999, Barry Winchell, a PFC in the US Army stationed in Tennessee started dating a performer from Nashville. The two loved each other, they were happily dating, good sex life, the whole bit. The difference, the woman Winchell was dating, Calpernia Addams, happened to have a penis.

At this point, I find myself, paradoxically, in the same position that 19th century thinkers were in over Manchester: namely, what do I CALL Ms Addams? Is she a woman? Is she gay? Is she a she? I don't struggle with these names because I dislike transsexuals, but simply because there ARE no names that aren't terrifically loaded with meaning that I don't necessarily want to carry in what I'm saying. If I say gay, that implies something that doesn't exist in this case, for instance. Winchell was attracted to someone who he, and the other party, considered a woman. Winchell was asked, point blank, if he was gay, and responded 'no.' The same issue occured in Luna: the father asks if his son is Gay. Well, from the son's point of view? No, not at all. She's attracted to men, and in her mind, she's a woman.

With other words, there is just too much baggage. 'Transsexual' as a word, to me, feels either clinical (like a diagnosis) or derogatory (ie, the root of the word 'tranny'). Of course there are many transsexuals who don't feel this way, and in fact many words in a lot marginalized communities are derogatory terms that are being reclaimed as badges of pride (queer is a good example). But that's the thing: until the world has time to settle in, the world HAS baggage - negative or positive depending on the readers point of view, but baggage nonetheless.

This can make it uncomfortable, even dangerous to have the conversation. If I don't LIKE the word transsexual, then when you say it to me, the meaning of what you're saying changes, unavoidably. If the word Drag Queen has associations of ridiculousness to you, it's difficult to discuss someone who likes to wear women's clothing without marginalizing them, EVEN IF YOU DON'T WANT TO, simply because our vocaublary is designed to marginalize people.

And the marginalization is sadly very effective. After being harassed by some of his fellow soldiers for his relationship, one of the harassers pounded his skull in with a baseball bat as he slept.

The immediate reaction in this situation is, for me at least, horror, abject and terrible. Followed by a deep desire to believe the murderer is, simply, a monster. But the problem is, believing men to be monsters is what created the situation in the first place. This isn't to remove any personal responsibility from the situation. The murderer is, DEFINITELY a murderer, and the act he committed is horrific. But, to make actions like this stop, just like making Luddite riots stop, we have to be able to name things, we have to be able to give people a vocabulary, because without a vocabulary, there is no world of ideas and thought, there is no change. You cannot get rid of monsters by killing monsters, you can only get rid of monsters by teaching them to be human.

Creating Names

Names are very powerful things. Consider the history of the last 10 years of the United States without the word terrorist, or the history of the holocaust without the words holocaust and genocide. Words DO matter - that's why I love to read, after all. The problem is that, naturally, the past has an advantage in loaded words over the future. When homosexuality became more public, it was the old word, first, that people knew: sodomy.

The trick is the future must find a way to make a new word. Sometimes, this is done, again, by subverting the old words, taking them back to make new meanings like I mentioned earlier. Sometimes it isn't - perhaps the old word is unreclaimable, perhaps the people affected want a fresh start. One way or the other, new language is created: 'Negro' becomes 'African American', 'sodomite' becomes 'homosexual'.

Of course, this new-word attitude is easy to lampoon, and can be overdone. This is where a lot of the animosity towards political correctness begins. If *I* say Negro without bias, why shouldn't I say it? Frederick Douglass said Negro. WEB Dubois said Negro. MLK said Negro. Why make a new word? Why be upset when people don't use your new word? It's a tricky balance, of course, but you have to remember that while you can control how you say an old word, you CAN'T control how someone else HEARS it. And even if using an unloaded word, using careful language feels awkward now, and even if it changes noone's mind, it educates a new generation with a new, more compassionate vocabulary - just as the old Mancunians had to learn a new way to describe a city, a factory, a world.

One of the truly painful things in the story about Addams and Winchell to me was that the two men most implicated in it were not designed to be bigots. One of them had a transvestite fetish and may have been homosexual. The other had known homosexuals in high school and had no problem with them. The issue is that the words still carried the weight of bias, and the stiuation provided no vocabulary to talk the situation over like humans. The argument: "You're a faggot!" "No, I'm not!" is, if you tease it apart, an argument over labels, a war of definition. The argument never made it beyond definition into conversation - partly because there IS no general definition for the situation Addams and Winchell found themselves in. Would the murderers have magically been nice guys who could have overcome their fear if there was a way to define the situation? Perhaps not. Perhaps the conversation would have solved nothing, perhaps it would have revealed only an irreconcilable hatred. But I wish they could have had the conversation, that they could have tried. And I wish WE could have the conversation, as a society, without having to struggle to define what it is we're even talking about.

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The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton

I know I don't do a very good job of living up to my ideals, but social justice is a subject dear to my heart. This shows in my reading, I imagine - I love books that struggle with what it means to be a just society, that highlight injustice, that try to show the road to justice - Upton Sinclair, Victor Hugo, Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Karl Marx, Anne Bronte : each of these writers stirs me first and foremost as visionaries trying to imagine a world that is more equitable and just. Even in my admittedly humble work (I fix computers, if you didn't know), the thing that get's me to the office every day is the idea that somehow, my little drop labors might free people from the constraints of ugliness and dehumanization that is sadly such a big part of a post-industrial world. I like to dream, and social justice is the grandest, most beautiful of dreams.

In Fruit of the Tree, with the quiet impartiality of Dame Justice herself, Wharton carefully deconstructs what this dream costs, in real, human sorrow. This is not a story of revolution, but it is akin to one, in that it tells the tale of what must be sacrificed at the altars of progress, and how unsure the outcomes of that sacrifice really are. This doesn't make the book reactionary - Wharton really seems to champion the causes that the characters sacrifice for. But it is brutally, calmly realistic. If you cannot understand how the wealthy class in turn of the century America (or any inequitable society) can have be so blind to the misery that they extracted their wealth from, read this book - it opened my eyes, and gave me a new compassion for those who have wealth, but have a conscience at the same time.

**SPOILERS**

This is the story of two very idealized idealists: John Amherst and Justine Brent. Amherst is a socially-conscious engineer, working in the mills owned by the recently widowed Bessie Langhope. At the beginning an accident has befallen one of Amherst's workers, and he is being cared for by the intelligent, sympathetic young nurse, Justine Brent. The accident is due to the terrible conditions of the mill town, and when Bessie comes to visit the mills for the first time, Amherst sees the opportunity to try to change some of the inequities of the system. Beginning simply with the desire to open Bessie's eyes to the inequities, things progress quickly, and the two are married. The marriage is a difficult one, as Amherst comes to realize that he entered it in large part as a means to the end of improving the mills, and as Bessie ceases to be interested in his larger social questions. This leads to a painful series of events, and an ending that I won't ruin for you, even in a spoiler free section. But sufficeth to say, the book grapples with social justice, euthanasia, women's equality, the value of the individual, and the basic questions of what is and is not a moral act.

**END SPOILERS

This was Wharton's third novel, and lacks some of the polish of, for instance, Age of Innocence (a difficult standard to judge against...). The dialogue feels wooden at times, the characters too consistent, if that makes sense (the idealists are ALWAYS idealists, for instance). But the strength of this novel is that each one of the characters has, by the end of the book, a real soul, full of blacks, greys and whites, and deserving of human respect and pity, even at their ugliest moments. You see how someone can take away the chance for basic schooling and medical care for a town full of people, because they want to build a private luxury gymnasium, without just being a soulless monster. You see how a devotion to seeing good done on a social scale, can make someone treat the people closest to them abominably. You see how good people turn wicked, how morally ambiguous people can strice for moments of heroism.

And in a sense, the absolutes of this book - the extreme idealists for instance - are part of the point. While the book is presented as a tragedy, in a sense, it presents an ideal scenario for social change - the perfect idealist, obtains the means to effect change, then gains total freedom to enact his plans, then gets all the help he could ask for, and even succeeds in his aims, making thousands of lives infinitely better. And in the process, still takes away the greatest possible happiness he himself, and those he loves best, could have ever enjoyed. It's a novel that shows that you cannot really change the world simply through self sacrifice - you inevitably, unavaoidably sacrifice the people you love as well, and for that reason idealism itself takes a special sort of callousness and cruelty - even if it is the road to the best of all possible worlds.

And, while Wharton is NOT perfect, the writing IS vintage Wharton - beautiful, overgrown, rich with a deep layering of gorgeous, fragrant language:

There [the marsh] lay in charmed solitude, shut in by a tawny growth of larch and swamp-maple, its edges burnt out to smouldering shades of russet, ember-red and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved a jewel-like green where hidden lanes of moisture wound between islets tufted with swamp-cranberry and with the charred browns of fern and wild rose and bay. Sodden earth adn decaying branches gave forth a sweet odour, as of the aromatic essence embalming a dead summer; and the air charged with this scent was so still that the snapping of witch-hazel pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled fron, pricked the silence with separate points of sound.

And her careful observation of what it is to be human is laced throughout the entire book:

Bessy's mind was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened it with unintelligible problems. She felt herself the victim of circumstances to which her imagination attributed the deliberate malice that children ascribe to the furniture they run against in playing. This helped her to cultivate a sense of helpless injury and to disdain in advance the advice she was perpetually seeking.

Fruit of the Tree was out of print for 90 years after it was first published (there is now an off-brand press edition available through Amazon, I believe). Different places on line describe it as a soap opera, and invariably as one of Wharton's lesser works. But, for it's unique comination of an acute eye, a deep knowledge of the upper class, and an earnest desire to understand why the world has so much trouble changing, this book deserves a revival.

(Image from Stitch)

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Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

"From his deepest soul, he that hour loosed and parted from every hope in the life that now is, and offered his own will an unquestioning sacrifice to the Infinite. Tom looked up to the silent, ever-living stars,--types of the angelic hosts who ever look down on man; and the solitude of the night rung with the triumphant words of a hymn, which he had sung often in happier days, but never with such feeling as now."

Let me tell you what's wrong with Uncle Tom's Cabin, because it's one of those books people feel the need to hate. Uncle Tom's Cabin is not gorgeously written. It sermonizes frequently. The book reinforces some terrible black stereotypes: the 'happy darky', the 'picanniny', the tragically beautiful mulatto, the Mammy nurse. Uncle Tom's Cabin draws on flat, melodramatic characters at the expense of human emotion. Uncle Tom's Cabin is terrifically unbalanced, terribly bigoted, and unredeemably out of date. It is less a classic than an artifact.

Now, let me tell you, please, why I loved reading it anyway.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was not an angel. She was simply a woman who saw that a thing was wrong in the world, and wanted to change it. She wasn't a great stateswoman or a practical reformer, and knew nothing really about how to, nuts and bolts wise, fix the problem of slavery. What she did know was the feeling of slavery. And for all that we now dismiss the book as sentimental, melodramatic and campy, it touched people when it was written - in fact, it was the second highest selling book after the Bible, and earned Stowe's reputation as one of the great abolitionists around the world. The book wounded people - people who did not know what to think were convinced by it, people who disagreed with Stowe were enraged by it. This book, in a way that few simple novels have been, is a mover of history.

And, the thing is, if you accept the sentimentality for what it is, and accept the book's shortcomings, this is still a really moving book. Tom is one of the most unabashedly Christ-like characters in the history of literature. Eva is a poignant, beautiful allegory of Christian thought. Legree channels the soul of evil in a way that is deeply disturbing. The trick is to think of this less as a novel about real people, and more like an allegory, a sort of Puritan version of the religious vision. The characters are types, sure - but that's because they represent ideas, not personalities. And you can feel the fervent hope of a woman who desperately wanted to do her part behind those ideas. It was an imperfect part, sure, and even bad in it's way, but it was noble and full of love. In some sense, the measure of a successful social movement is when we can look at it's founders and think they were backwards.

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