Notes from Underground

Magic Nativism

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10/22/09

From an undisclosed location in the southern tropics, I received the following communication, most likely composed on an ancient PC encrusted with fish entrails:

How do you argue with this kind of person?

I feel like she just wants to hate something and doesn’t want to know how to solve it?

Am I wrong?

Seriously, what is the solution?

My correspondent included a conversation with someone regarding “All of the people who came to this country illegally, use up all our resources, don’t pay income tax and refuse to learn the English language.”

I replied that I think it’s a case of being uncomfortable with other cultures plus blaming the wrong people.

The fact that some or all of them are illegal is irrelevant to the discomfort level. That’s just a socially acceptable excuse for disliking them. There are plenty of legal immigrants, naturalized citizens, and natural-born citizens who would probably be just as annoying to this person. I remember my own relatives going on about blacks and Hispanics in Chicago, not to mention welfare queens in Michigan, and probably none of them were illegal immigrants. If only we could all live in little enclaves of like-minded people, separated by mountains from anyone who makes us uncomfortable.

In my own experience, I’ve worked in a laundry room with a dozen Spanish-speaking workers and managers. They could all speak English, but they didn’t, because it was more fun to talk in Spanish so that the gringos couldn’t tell what they were saying. Sometimes they would tease me in Spanish, and that was really no different from being teased in English by some small-town punk in Michigan. I’ve also worked with jerkoffs in California who would talk about Hispanic workers in English, expecting them to not understand that they were being cheated or insulted. Living in the same place where you were born is only a guarantee that you can be arrogant toward visitors and get away with it; it doesn’t make someone deserving of any special regard.

My other experience is from having a car accident involving some illegal immigrants. I know they were uninsured and probably illegal because they begged me not to call the police, and they phoned a friend to negotiate with me in English. I accepted a really small amount of money for the damage they did, and that car was never fixed, since I found out it would cost five times as much to fix it. I should have filed a police report so that I could have filed an insurance claim with my own company. I don’t blame them for being uninsured; I blame myself for feeling sorry for them, when I should have let them deal with the consequences of being reported to the police and my insurance company.

We could blame the illegal immigrants for not getting their paperwork straight if they wanted to work here, but I think if I was desperate enough I would probably take the same risks. We could also blame the federal government for not being tough enough, but the feds are doing exactly what they are told to do by the business interests.*

If there was no demand for cheap labor in agricultural, construction, custodial, retail, factory, warehouse, and restaurant work, there would be a lot fewer illegal immigrants. I worked for a painting contractor who said he hired lots of illegals because they were willing to work for $9.00 an hour and they usually showed up for work, unlike most of the soft, arrogant, pampered, overfed, whiny little white boys in the wealthiest county in Indiana. I’ve also worked as a day laborer for temporary services that could not get unemployed white guys to come out of the welfare office and load freezer trucks for $8.00 an hour.

With all that said, I agreed that the bottom line was that the other person just wanted to hate something, and you can’t solve that by arguing.

* “All You Americans Are Fired.” Jessica Garrison, Ken Bensinger, and Jeremy Singer-Vine. Buzzfeed.com (1 December 2015). http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/all-you-americans-are-fired.

Some Cutting Remarks

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3/25/15

From an undisclosed location in the northern tropics, I received this message, most likely typed on an iPad encrusted with fish entrails:

    What do you think of this essay? I’m curious of your opinion.

My correspondent included a link to an old essay, “Trying Out One’s New Sword,” written by British philosopher Mary Midgley.

Midgley is a philosopher known for criticizing scientific reductionism and encouraging the use of moral philosophy to define ethical purposes, rather than merely to justify ethical means. She believes that religious sentiment is intrinsic to humanity. She has promoted and rationalized the Gaia Hypothesis.

This version of her essay is from a textbook edited by Christina Hoff Sommers, which coincidentally I read in an ethics class I took in 1987. The electronic file linked to was hosted on the site of Iranian transhumanist and human rights activist Sam Ghandchi, linked from a list of human rights articles written by others. Midgley first published the essay in her book, “Heart and Mind” (1981).

The essay criticizes the “moral isolationist” who refuses to exercise moral judgment against others. This is a reference to the isolationist stance before WWII, which was official US policy up until 1941. Isolationism as foreign policy was associated with conservative Republicans and southern Democrats in the US, based on a tradition of non-interventionism in foreign conflicts.

Midgley described her critique in more detail in the introduction to “Heart and Mind” and in the 1987 essay, “The Flight from Blame.” She attacked analytical philosophers for promoting a cowardly approach to ethics that led to a kind of post-modern refusal to judge anything  as “wrong,” that is, moral relativism.

Midgley’s example (the inspiration for the title) is taken from an obscure and perhaps apocryphal Japanese custom of justifying the random street killing of a commoner by a samurai, by claiming that the samurai was merely testing his new sword. The Japanese term is tsujigiri, which literally means “crossroads killing” and may denote merely a street assault or a person committing such an attack. The practice was said to have been banned under the Edo regime in 1602. In practice, although the samurai had a formal right to kill a member of the common (or “non-human”) class of people for any discourteous conduct, most officials would probably have discouraged it. Even if the samurai was punished, the punishment depended upon the relative social standing of the attacker and the victim, although a victim was technically allowed to defend himself.

Most new samurai swords were actually tested on the corpses of executed criminals. So, really, my mysterious correspondent wanted me to comment on an ethical speculation about a foreign culture, where the main question is whether we have a right to judge the mythical practices of that culture.

It seems to me that the more interesting question is whether we have the right to moralize about other people based on mythology, speculation, and ignorant generalizations about them. I say, of course we do, since our ignorant opinion about them is also meaningless if we do not actually hold any power over them. We are free to pointlessly moralize about other countries and cultures, just as we are free to pointlessly moralize about national politics, sports, magical crystals, and the cosmic interrelatedness of ravioli and dung beetles. And everyone who doesn’t want to join us in our outrage has the right to ignore our ignorant generalizations.

So, on that issue, I suggest that we are free to moralize about anything at all, as long as there is no consequence. If an issue is consequential, that is, if our opinion will lead to an action that will affect others, then we are obligated to moralize about it.

Another interesting question is whether it is better to justify killing someone because they are lower status and personally offensive (a social reason), or because the weapon’s effectiveness needs to be proven (a pragmatic reason).

The obvious answer for a sociopath, such as a serial killer, is that the pragmatic justification of testing weapons or methods is preferable. Quality assurance, efficiency, and practical effectiveness are the hallmarks of the sociopath. Anyone with experience in the military, retail, industrial, or corporate world can verify this.

Normal, well-socialized people prefer to justify killing based on the low social status of the victim, along with pointing out any of their behaviors that might have provoked an attack. My research suggests that this was true most of the time in traditional Japanese society, as well as in traditional European society, and is still true today everywhere, including in the US.

Anecdotally, I’ve been physically attacked only by higher status males who thought they were enforcing some perverse social order, but not by any lower status people. (No, I’m not counting my brother and sisters.)

In conclusion, I suspect that samurai felt free to punish any commoner for any reason so as to maintain social order, even if it included killing them. Among themselves, they probably snickered about how they were just testing their swords. I don’t have any problem denouncing both practices.

The War Against Errors

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9/15/05

On a hot, humid July day, I discovered the park squeezed in between Washington Street and the IUPUI campus near downtown Indianapolis. I had driven down University Boulevard hundreds of times without trying to find out where those joggers were going, the ones who occasionally drifted by on the south side of the campus. That day, though, my daughter and I ventured boldly across the lawn alongside the National Institute for Fitness and Sport. All of a sudden, the river appeared across my view, stretching west along an undeveloped south bank. Then, to the east, I had an uncharacteristically stunning view of downtown at the end of a broad cobblestone walkway. Dropping away from the walkway was a baffling maze of concrete steps, manicured grass, huge stone blocks, and rectangular pools and waterways. A set of stone benches terraced six high in a quarter circle simulated the ruins of a Roman amphitheater, like those at Ephesus in Turkey. Far off to the southeast was the marshmallow-topped building formerly known as the Hoosier Dome.

It was 86 degrees and I was sweating as we walked faster down the cobblestone walkway. Walking parallel to us in the grass were several people carrying clipboards. We passed them as we went toward downtown, with the RCA Tennis Championships on the north side. Before reaching the oversized green plastic frog sitting on a bench facing the NCAA Hall of Champions, we turned in to the park. A set of red pawprints made a trail on the concrete, leading from a rectangular pool over to the NCAA. This was supposed to be the trail left by the Indians’ mascot, Rowdie, after he fell in the water when a stray baseball hit him on the nose.

Defying the civil engineers who laid out the park’s sidewalks east-to-west, we cut south across the lawn to the Dr. Frank P. Lloyd Visitor Center. Once around the building, we saw the west entrance to Victory Field framed by the overarching exit sign for the park. After crossing the street toward the stadium, we passed a man and a woman just standing on the street corner. The man was talking into a cellphone, saying, “Yeah, we’re here on the corner of Maryland. Are you in the parking garage?”

At first I was intimidated by the throngs of people headed for the stadium and the long line at the ticket window. Then I found out that our online tickets enabled us to walk right up to the gate, where no one was waiting. An attendant scanned the barcodes printed on the tickets and we passed through the turnstiles. Our seats were right across from the gate, in the “party terrace.” Behind us, a British man explained baseball rules to his wife.

The date was July 19th, two days before the near-bombing of London on “7/21,” which was two weeks after the notorious “7/7.”

The concession ring wasn’t too crowded, so I went to stand in line for popcorn, wavering between the $1.50 box and the giant $3.50 tub. An older man in front of me turned and said, “I always pick the slowest line.” Then a younger man, carrying a clipboard, walked up and offered him money; the older man refused, and the younger man left. I bought a box of popcorn, then went over to the lemonade vendor, who was crushing beer cans and saving them. I bought a lemonade for only $2.75.

The white-uniformed Indians were in the second game of a four-game series against the black-uniformed Syracuse Skychiefs. The Skychiefs were unable to mount any kind of defense that day, usually striking out quickly. The frustration of their batters was reflected in the time one accidentally splintered his bat, sending a piece flying down the third base line.

The Indians started out scoring in the second inning with a home run by Brad Eldred that went flying over the left field picnic area. As the Indians kept scoring with increasing frequency, the Skychiefs called several timeouts to discuss strategy. Their befuddlement was mocked by a sardonic announcer who played an old Buffalo Springfield tune: “Something’s happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear / There’s a man with a gun over there…” Well, I don’t think he intended to play that last line, unless he was also trying to make a political comment.

Eldred ended up being walked twice, then he scored another home run, clinching his eventual callup to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Ty Wigginton also got a home run, but not before “missing” a homer early on. Wigginton had struck out in the first inning, then in a fit of rage tossed his helmet and bat onto the field, where a batboy dutifully retrieved them.

The serenity of the baseball field had been accented an hour into the game by a subtle moonrise, framed between the second and third smokestacks of the massive Citizens Thermal Energy plant to the south.

Afterwards, we walked back through White River State Park along the wide cobblestone walkway. It was nearly 10:00 and the temperature had dropped to about 76 degrees, just enough so that a slight breeze made the humid air drift away for a moment. In the dark, the trees alongside the path framed a line of antique-style streetlamps, and then we came up over the rise to find the river stretched out in front of us again.

Suddenly I was struck by the thought that this was like being in London, looking over the Thames River. In the spring of 1978 my family had visited an extravagant theatre in London that had been converted into a cinema, where we saw Star Wars, that operatic paean to Taoist philosophy and two-handed swordfighting. Around the same time, I bought a record album that included the Star Wars musical score, along with theme songs from British science fiction shows I had never seen, such as The Quatermass Experiment. This was during a time when IRA bombers and Palestinian terrorists were much in the news, and the line between good and evil seemed pretty clear to any comic-book reader. Every time I listened to that soaring, martial music from Star Wars, I knew which side I wanted to be on.

Coming shortly after the revival of The Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars story tapped into a deep longing in the general public for Manichean fantasies, in which the forces of absolute moral good face off against the forces of absolute moral evil. What made both sets of stories interesting is that you couldn’t objectively tell who would win, because the evil forces seemed so much more powerful. You had to believe that the good guys would win purely because of their intrinsic moral superiority. Both series eventually gave strangely introspective warnings about the error of trying to power up meek good guys enough to defeat impossibly powerful bad guys, but they started out with the assumption that the universal principles of good and evil were roughly equal in scope. Manicheanism depends on the fallacy that the creator of the universe is not the master of it, but merely a spectator who is betting on the guy in the white hat. That’s why it used to be called “heresy,” although later it was called “moral clarity.”

I left the riverside to drive back through the protective ring of working-class neighborhoods, past the men hanging out by the liquor store at 22nd and Illinois, to the sterility and tedium of the suburban fiefdoms. The Indians had decisively shut out the Skychiefs (13-0) not because of their intrinsic goodness, but because they played a better game.

The Crowd Is Always Wrong

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I would not endorse participation in a mass protest because it is pointless. As a political act, it communicates the fact that the government is not literally in control of each person, which is comforting to some people who are compliant and unhappy, while it is terrifying to some people who are compliant and happy.

Now, the political effect of every mass protest is to impel government action to either appease the crowd  or to destroy the crowd, because the crowd is irrational. Appeasing the crowd may be dehumanizing and destroying the crowd may be inhumane, but both of these are normal functions of government (appeasing a group of people under its jurisdiction or destroying a group of people under its jurisdiction). The only thing special about mass protest is that it is a public spectacle. It allows leaders to justify their actions, to pretend that they are not responsible for what they do, since “the people demanded it” or “the people were out of control.”

Either way, the leaders do whatever they want, and the people in the crowd are not treated as individual persons, but more like animals. Groups of animals may be fed, sheltered, and comforted, or they may be confined, exploited, and killed. No one asks them for a political position statement.

Mass protest against police violence doesn’t really solve the problem of police violence. It just pushes the government to either appease the crowd or to use police violence to make the crowd shut up. Either feeds the paranoia of the individuals in power. The more they treat people as crowds, the more the people in crowds act like crowds, which makes the people in power more paranoid.

Is a crowd “wrong” because it is made up of poor, ignorant, sick, lawless, or ill-bred people? No, the type of people in a crowd does not make it necessarily wrong. From the point of view of someone who believes himself to be above a crowd of different-looking people, exercising authority over a crowd of lesser people, or protected from a crowd of unruly people, it may seem like the main problem with crowds is that it takes so much pepper spray and riot gear to clean them out of public parks and streets.

The crowd is wrong because joining a crowd means giving up personal responsibility. Even if a crowd were motivated by good feelings and accomplishing good purposes, it would still be wrong. It would still be a group of people who don’t want to act like persons because as persons they don’t feel powerful enough.

But even if a crowd of self-righteous, highly educated, wealthy, law-following, taxpaying, property-owning people all decide to be upstanding individualistic heroes, they are still a crowd. They still follow stochastic patterns of group behavior; they still appropriate stupid ideas as dogmatic ideology; they still respond instinctively with paranoia when their tribal symbolism is desecrated; they still savage anyone who deviates from unspoken norms; they still immerse themselves in thoughtless, indifferent violence; they still lie, cheat, and steal under cover of anonymity. Their crowd doesn’t have to gather on the street, in the open, because they own the street.

There is no justice in crowds. The crowd seeks a palliative, a sedative or a release, not justice. “Mob justice,” like “crowd control,” is final because it can never be questioned or evaluated; it can never be justified because it has no principle of reason.

Random Signals

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Nowadays, it’s kind of ordinary to be able to immediately read, hear, or watch some communication from anywhere in the world. Back in the mid-twentieth century, the easiest way to get foreign news was to listen to shortwave radio.

While living in Germany, I could listen to English-language news from all over the world, including the USSR. While living in the US, I could listen to German-language news.

One of my favorite things to do was compare the different versions of a story broadcast by the Voice of America, Radio Moscow, Deutsche Welle, the BBC, and other broadcasters. Later, when I was studying journalism, I mentioned to a professor how I liked listening to shortwave radio. His face contorted with disgust and he sneered something sarcastic. After that he would occasionally direct contemptuous remarks at me in class.

Eventually I figured out that because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the development of the World Wide Web, a lot of shortwave broadcasters got their funding cut in the 1990s. So, most of the stations that could be easily picked up in the US were not broadcasting international news and cultural programming, but rather religious, political, or fringe-culture programming produced within the US, as a kind of alternative media outlet.

Apparently, from the point of view of my journalism professor, shortwave radio had changed in character:  from a pluralistic forum that demonstrated the virtues of liberal democratic societies as against totalitarian societies, to an annoying cacophony of shrill, narrow-minded ideologues and fanatics. In other words, it had become just like talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet. The Internet loomed especially large as a bogeyman for journalists, since it had indirectly destroyed his career at a major newspaper, along with the careers of dozens of his coworkers.

This theme of desperation and frustrated idealism was expressed by professors and textbooks in all my journalism classes as an explicit longing for the supposed golden age of newspaper journalism, which existed for them in a sweet spot sometime between the end of World War II and the proliferation of interconnected microcomputers.

They were totally baffled by the general public’s abandonment of mass-market print journalism as the authoritative source of news. More importantly, they were deeply wounded by the outright rejection of the model of society presented by newspaper and TV journalism during the golden age. That model consisted of an ideal liberal polity where a couple of public-minded media behemoths in each market, maybe three or four in large cities, defined all the issues worth discussing, filtering out minority or fringe views and trying to lead everyone to standardized notions of patriotism, good government, civic religion, public education, popular science, consumer culture, fine arts, and great books.

I know there wasn’t actually ever unanimous agreement on what made a good society, and my teachers didn’t believe that either. In fact, that’s why the newspaper cheerleaders were so confused by the fragmentation of the mass media. They thought that their model was a perfect way to create a peaceful society unified by liberal ideals, by including as many rational voices as possible while stifling any notions of radical or reactionary change.

As it turned out, the development of moderately-priced individualized mass communication devices totally destroyed the old dream of molding society strictly through the control of information. Information still gets filtered and funneled, but for now, the filters operate according to the choices of each individual reader, viewer, or listener. And the media corporations that have the most control over information (such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) benefit from the persistent fragmentation of the market, as long as they are able to keep aggregating producers, consumers, and sharers of information to themselves.

Those who produce content now have less potential for control, however, since the media landscape no longer supports a winner-take-all strategy. It wasn’t as if there were many actual information monopolies before, except in small markets or within the domain of sovereign governments; but everyone followed a monopolistic strategy anyway, with the goal of commanding attention long enough or broadly enough to definitively influence an issue, a region, or a genre.

In the end, the ineffectiveness of monopolistic media strategies is a cause for outrage from many different kinds of people. Yet they all want some kind of superficial unity, a consensus on some ideal that can be shared among everyone in society. If their personal ideal can’t find perfect agreement in their broader social world, they feel that chaos looms and life is hardly worth living. The random signals coming from the real world of autonomous microcultures seem to them to foreshadow an apocalyptic end to civilization, a descent into the madness of free will and individual preference.

To me, though, the whole world has always been filled with random signals from societies that are foreign to me. My upbringing taught me to regard every human society as temporary, conditional, and limited; and so any particular presentation of human society is nothing more than a curious cultural artifact.

Outside the Box

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As long as you restrict your reading to the same echo-chamber garbage day after day, you will always be a very small, very sorry person.

I learned this early on when I realized that even though I could spell better than most people, I could also learn algebra. For some reason, most of my classmates either hated English or hated Math, if they didn’t hate every subject. When I was 14, I experimented with poetry and I experimented with deriving a progression for prime numbers that would enable me to quickly calculate square roots. I started getting really irritated by kids who would whine about how a certain subject was “impossible” for them to even make an effort to understand, not based on ability, but on their choice to stay comfortable in their little box.

Eventually, I developed an unconscious habit, perhaps even a dangerous obsession, of reacting to everything I learned by seeking out its opposite. Since I was taking advanced German, I also had to take advanced Physics. Since I was reading John Stuart Mill, I also had to read Friedrich Nietzsche. Since I was reading Robert Anton Wilson’s books (ground zero for 1980s psychedelic anarchists), I also had to read the monthly American Spectator (ground zero for 1980s paleo-conservatives).

This absurdist intellectual fantasy blew up when I chose to enroll in engineering college, even though I was a better writer than mathematician. I found myself knee-deep in math, so much so that I once had a vivid nightmare about a ten-page derivation of a single equation for a class in electromagnetic fields. (The assignment was real; that’s why I had a nightmare about it.) I was going to class and trying to pay attention, but then I would go back to my dorm room and read philosophy or stay up all night talking about theoretical physics, instead of doing homework. By the end, I was failing everything except German class.

The year before they actually kicked me out of school, I got a warning from my academic adviser. He asked me why my grades were so bad. I didn’t tell him how I was wasting my time instead of doing homework; I just said that I wasn’t sure why I was there, that I wanted to know why we were working on certain kinds of problems. He stared at me incredulously for a moment, then said, “David, engineers don’t ask ‘why,’ they just do it. Maybe you should go somewhere else and study philosophy.” I was amused and slightly offended, because everyone at engineering school knew that liberal arts majors were idiots.

A year later, I was a liberal arts major. At least I didn’t have to major in journalism; all liberal arts majors knew that journalism classes were for people who weren’t smart enough to do serious scholarly work.

Since liberal arts majors are generally encouraged to look at contradictory points of view, I was a little more comfortable. For example, I was able to get an A on a paper arguing against affirmative action by using Marxist theory. However, I wasn’t any less arrogant, so I failed freshman English three times (twice for the first semester, once for the second semester).

When it seemed to me like I would never actually graduate from college, I took a job in a machine shop while I finished writing a 2,500-word analysis of literary themes in a contemporary German novel. That job in the machine shop was the first of several low-wage jobs in factories, warehouses, restaurants, and retail stores over the next ten years.

I decided that it was really stupid to not specialize in one thing that I could do well, because then I basically looked like every other unskilled laborer. This was driven home to me when my manager at one company, in an effort to help me get promoted, told me how very important it was to create “distance” between me and the “lower” workers if I wanted to be perceived as worthy. So, just as I had done in a previous job, I did my manager’s work of documenting another employee’s incompetence and then confronting the guy to fire him. I somehow thought that would give me credibility to ask for raises for the other employees, but when I did, the assistant vice president sarcastically explained to me that it was not a good idea, because “they’ll just waste it on food and beer anyway.”

Finally, at around 32 years old, I realized that no one cared about what I could possibly do or why I did anything at all. All they cared about was whether I could actually do something better than someone else. I realized that there was only one thing I did better than most other people, which was reading academic papers. That skill transferred to editing college textbooks, but the textbook publishers wouldn’t hire someone with a German degree: “Uh . . . we need you to edit in English. Sorry!”

So, I went back to school to get a master’s degree in English. However, all the classes looked really boring, so I was going to take a bunch of electives from Journalism, but I had to get their permission. The Journalism Department persuaded me to just major in journalism instead, so that I wouldn’t have to take boring classes. That was fine, until I found out that papers for journalism classes don’t typically use rhetorical analysis or textual analysis, since those are unapproved “liberal arts” approaches to media studies. Also, journalistic assignments don’t encourage questioning a source’s credibility or presenting multiple viewpoints, because that just confuses the reader. There should be only one “government” viewpoint, only one “scientific” viewpoint, and only two “political” viewpoints.

Also, interviewing people who sincerely believe in religion or gun rights scares the crap out of the typical politically liberal journalism student. I had some fun presenting my investigation of right-wing anti-government groups that were active during the George W. Bush administration.

During this time, I was proofreading and editing textbooks for a subcontractor who didn’t care whether I had an English or Journalism degree. I did a lot of technical textbooks, mainly because they often get edited by a copyeditor, that is, someone who actually goes through the entire book, line by line, checking for consistency and accuracy. A few times I was assigned a textbook specifically because I was the only person who knew what a calculus equation was supposed to look like, or who had ever seen the inside of a machine shop.

Textbook proofreading and editing was a good idea until the publishers decided to stop editing textbooks, since “fact-checking” didn’t really matter to most people anyway, and it was cheaper to just send the manuscript from the author over to China to have it printed. That publishing approach didn’t last long, but by the time the textbook market rebounded I had gotten a full-time job in academic publishing.

The main reason I got a full-time, permanent position as a scholarly editor was because of my varied background. Most of the people with adequate academic credentials don’t have practical publishing industry experience, and most of the people with practical publishing experience don’t have adequate academic credentials. Most people who have both are successful as full-time freelance editors, so they don’t want to be constricted by working on-site all the time in an institutional job.

Of course, I made about half the income of most people my age with equivalent education, and I broadened myself so far that I was not even suited for a corporate job in commercial publishing anymore. A few years ago I applied for a copyediting job at a major publisher. After looking at my resume, he said, “I notice you’ve worked on a wide variety of books for different publishers and using different conventions. You know that we only publish one line of books at this location, right? They all have exactly the same style. I’m not sure you would be able to do it the way we need.”

Ah, well. Just leave him to his little box.