The other day a long flatbed truck carrying a pile of wet sand roared by the post office, belching more racket than a pack of Harleys. It was an old truck with a heavy load, engine bellowing a scream of sharp distemper.
This was a decibel-breaker, although I have always looked at the decibel as a curious index of sound. Some of the loudest sounds would barely register on a decibel machine: the sneeze in a movie house as the film’s killer is about to strike; the hushed voice in a room where someone has died; a jar of pickles knocked off the supermarket shelf; the snap of twig just as the birder gets focused; the pop of a light bulb expiring, turning the basement dark.
The quality of sound tells more than its volume. A belt-driven wood saw is rich in decibels but at Millfest in Heritage Square the ear adjusts to it easily, a whine rich as the cicadas’ on an August afternoon. A pack of motorcycles along the Southwest Traffic way in Kansas City has an irritating, masochistic furor, unlike the roar of cycles on Saturday in Lindsborg, where the throaty rumble announces visitors and spreads gaiety and good nature.
Summer is a factor because heat can have an intensifying effect on sound. On a close, hot morning, a chain saw yowls through a tree limb, knifes the air, splits the ear. A wrench dropped in the garage clangs with a fierce report.
Most of us are in an earnest quest for quiet, but at the same time our citizenry is full of vitality in a world of engines, tools, utensils, cultivating gardens, cruising streets, lakes and streams. A few, even, take to the skies with their flying machines in person or by remote control. In all, this vitality is too great to hope for silence. Even now, we hear the distant bellow of an old V-8, perhaps a ’57 Chevy in a test run for the annual August car show, a place of rumbling and racking, the sounds of Doo-Wop and happy chatter in the North Park shade.
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A different contagion
Congratulations to the press for outlining, often in detail, another disappointing session of the state legislature: The Medicaid expansion denied again; more sluicing of public millions to private schools, a return to the Brownback policy of budget deficits and tax cuts for high enders; a move to throttle the state property tax for schools; the rush to make it even harder to vote. That and more – or less, depending on the view.
But there’s the idea. The legislature is dominated by minions who take their marching orders not from constituents but from Charles Koch’s policy institutes, and from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative think tank in Alexandria, Va.
Polls may tell us that 60 or 70 percent of Kansans favor expanding Medicaid coverage, at mostly federal expense, for the150,000 poor who remain ineligible. Surveys may show that Kansans want more freedom to vote. The ghost writers in Virginia say otherwise. They crank out suppressive legislation for statehouse Republicans who obediently put it in the hopper and memorize the talking points and catch-phrases that say no, and no again. This is happening in statehouses all over.
We confront a curious paradox. The very process of a progressive struggle tends to make us lose our grip on our own democratic principles. We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. The most alarming spectacle today is not the authoritarian purge in Russia or China’s payday loan scheme of foreign aid, but the spectacle of Kansans who accept loyalty oaths and witch hunts and ghost-written laws, and who call anyone they don’t like, or agree with, a socialist or a communist. And people who go on about freedom and liberty while hunting for someone to hang from a gallows on the Capitol Hill.
The American climate has changed. A different contagion has been introduced in this country, one that can sweep into every home and office, changing the world we now know into something different, more sinister.
Eventually, perhaps in this century, the world may become politically unified. This may be a unity of disaster, when we go up in a burst of fissionable fuss – or if we can hang on for awhile, when we can knock some truth and sense into each other’s heads, quit calling each other “foreigners”, and get down to business.
