There Will Be Mergers and Rumors of Mergers

Ways of determining and choosing the appropriate size of the world.

When I was a teenager, I worked at a D’Angelo’s sub shop in Worcester. I chopped a lot of onions in the walk-in, and tried to pile as much stuff as possible onto each 6” Number Nine grinder I got for my shift meal.

One day, some guys came in and ripped out the Coke fountains, which had worked just fine, and replaced them with Pepsi dispensers. The reason was that PepsiCo had bought the chain.

Not long after, PepsiCo jammed a Pizza Hut into most of the D’Angelo’s stores. By then I was gone. But I remember the quality of the sandwiches suffered from the pizza smell and the divided focus of the teenagers who’d taken my place.

Appropriate scale

How big should things be, and how connected? This feels abstract. But it’s at the core of our most stubborn difficulties here in America. Should adults be able to buy marijuana in Pennsylvania but not Ohio? Sure, variety is the spice of life! But that puts you on the losing side of states’ rights as far as things like the Civil War.

When people admire Renaissance architecture, one thing they come back to is the human scale of it. The Pazzi Chapel in Florence is about the size of a decent-sized mcmansion, but with a very different effect.

A football stadium is built at a different scale than a bungalow. The Burj Khalifa is built to the scale of something that may never exist. It’s built as if to summon such a thing, like the ghost cities of China.

Siberian hospitality

In the late 20th century in New York City, there was a legendary bar in the mezzanine of a midtown subway stop called Siberia. As you entered, the owner and doorman would say “no cursing and no hitting on women.” Throughout your stay, he’d remind anyone who broke the rules, even as he broke them regularly himself.

Those rules created an atmosphere that was always friendly, seedy and invariably bananas as you rounded into the AM hours.

Being disconnected, by having separate local rules, can create a special experience. Two miles south of Siberia is another legendary tavern called McSorley’s, which is still open. For more than a century, it also boasted a set of bar-specific rules, which it was forced to relinquish, when a federal court ruled it had to let women in.

Progress, evolution and lies

To call a succession of events progress is a victory of inertia. It’s an abdication of judgment, and often honesty as well. Whenever progress is applied to events that don’t plot a discernible line, watch out. It means people are not thinking, and they’re not thinking about you.

People also like to call a succession of events evolution when things are getting worse. It’s their way of saying things are getting worse for a good reason. It’s cultish. Maybe the fact that we can only make increasingly ugly cars, ugly buildings, bad movies and insipid music in America is part of an evolutionary process. But that’s another thing: Evolution ain’t so great.

Evolution keeps making all animals into crabs, apparently. Over time, everything becomes a sideways-scuttling tank-like bug. Maybe we should stop cheering for evolution.

Chains, chains, chains

Money has to go somewhere. No one even pretends that it trickles down anymore. If you made a bundle in groceries, why not buy the smaller grocery chain a county over?

On it goes, until the anti-trust people get involved. Whatever happened to those guys, anyway? They seem to have kicked the ever-loving crap out of a couple book publishers the other day, while the biggest search engine owns the biggest video site, the biggest online retailer owns the biggest web-services company and the second biggest subscription video-streaming service, while the biggest social media platform owns the other biggest social media platform.

Even as a kid, people complained about the homogenization of America. It’s worse now, when I can pull off an interstate four states away and gauge, based on the upkeep of a mini-mall’s shrubbery how many lights until I find a Starbucks.

Rambling or not

The size and connectedness of one’s own society is a matter of taste. People usually express their taste staying in their hometown or by moving their weary bones down the track, to another town.

The ramblers and the folk who live within 10 miles of where they grew up both have good reasons to dislike the homogenization of America. For the ramblers it eradicates the differences that they travelled to enjoy. For the townsfolk, it’s a threat to ways of life they’d hoped to keep intact.

That the new grocery chain supposedly delivers the best cheeses the world has to offer is a cold comfort to many.

Consolidation’s fruits

What consolidation produces more than efficiencies or synergies is middle managers. They’re a type. I’ve been one. Middle managers have to listen carefully to half of the people in their organization, and make the other half feel like they’re being listened to. They have to be careful.

Middle managers rarely create anything except emails, workflows and processes. The ones who do it well don’t necessarily fare any better than the ones who do it badly. Career growth depends on favoritism and luck, neither of which the middle manager controls.

We middle managers are helpless and powerful according to a pulsing rhythm we can only hear sometimes. Eventually, we miss the beat, and it’s back to LinkedIn to talk about how solution-oriented we are.

The mark of the beast

The other day my daughter came home from school with some troubling news: The devil is going to make everyone wear the mark 666 on their forehead or hand. Of course, the kid who told her this wasn’t someone she held in high regard.

This is an old take on the Book of Revelation was in heavy rotation on the AM airwaves and in the black-and-red tri-fold Christian pamphlets going back to G.H. Bush’s speech about the New World Order in the early ‘90s. The bright lights at a national supermarket chain recently took it for inspiration at the self-check-out, which asked to scan my palm.

The whole mark-of-the-beast story persists not because it’s true, but because power continues to consolidate faster than before. The old oppositions are being bought off or folded in faster than human fractiousness can create new distinctions and divisions.

Sans frontiers

Inside a more connected, consolidated world, the sensation is one of destiny unfolding with excruciating slowness. Of course there’s a lot of money paying a lot of smart people to propagate that sensation.

Credit cards, cell phones, security cameras all give a sense that one is not only being watched, but effectively anticipated. It seems like a tight net. But the national homicide clearance rates keep falling and are now under 50%. The bluster that a nation needs people to believe to function is something it can never fulfill. This is something known by politicians and criminals, but never said aloud.

The trick is that the state doesn’t have to control our bodies or our acts, or even our words, but our attention. Our self-respect does the rest. Our self-respect dictates that the things which go unconsidered soon become unthinkable.

Babel referendum

It’s easy to say the wrong thing. Read the room, they say. Committing anything to the public record can feel like a high-wire act. But trying to say something to everyone is a recipe for nonsense. Just read a press release or listen to a speech written for a candidate.

Talking nonsense is the punishment to anyone who tries to mass-produce speech. That’s one way to look at the Tower of Babel story. It seems like the proliferation of tongues was a punishment, but it was a cure. It was a cure the same way that losing interest in the tower was a cure.

It stung to part ways with such a gargantuan accomplishment and superhuman ambition. But the fascination with the tower had to be broken to move out into the world. Similarly, language has to become unintelligible - through slang, jargon and the differentiation of languages themselves over time and space - in order to consider and speak certain truths.

It’s a shattering, but also a blossoming. It’s the seed that has to be broken to sprout. It’s a blessing that something always gets lost in translation, or else we would all know the same things.

Arcana

Talking to people is risky, especially if you’re saying something other than what they’re saying. Back in the Golden Age, Socrates was executed. Today people talk about being canceled for offering an unloved opinion, as if opening your mouth was ever safe.

Then as now, there are certain rooms for certain words. To call something esoteric isn’t just to say it’s little-known and difficult-to-grasp. It’s that one shouldn't be talking about it so loud, and never here, not with these people around.

One reason I loved writing poems all those years was that I could say anything because I knew no one world ever read them, just by dint of their being poems. Maybe that was acting in bad faith. Maybe that’s what the written word has always been a little bit about.

Art really works when you deliver it to the right room, usually a small one. It’s like Newton’s law of gravitation, where the size of the audience for a statement is inversely proportional to how meaningful it can be.

As the poet said: The Soul selects her own Society-

Selected bibliography

The Emily Dickinson poem that ends this essay

The phenomenon of everything evolving into a crab

Danny Jock did the image for this piece, and is taking commissions

An essay on wrongheaded striving

An earlier essay on the Tower of Babel