|
Menace-mobiles
Kelly Segars’ column promoting the city’s alternative transportation programs is an indication that Knoxville has finally entered the heated national debate over the automobile. This is good. Only when awareness of public health issues reaches critical mass do viable solutions arise. The automobile has become the greatest behavioral threat to safety, health and the environment; it is also the greatest national addiction. The car is so embedded in American culture that this week the Pulitzer Prize for criticism was, for the first time, given to a car critic. Now elevated to the status of literature, art and architecture, the automobile has become the mother of all human invented monsters. Marshall McLuhan’s dire warnings in the ’60s of the automobile as evil weren’t new; R. A. Lafferty, incredibly, was saying the same thing around 1900:
“Consider the man on horseback, and I have been a man on horseback for most of my life. Well, mostly he is a good man, but there is a change in him as soon as he mounts. Every man on horseback is an arrogant man, however gentle he may be on foot. The man in the automobile is one thousand times as dangerous. I tell you, it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind if the driving of automobiles becomes common. It will breed violence on a scale never seen before. It will mark the end of the family as we know it, the three or four generations living happily in one home. It will destroy the sense of neighborhood and the true cost of Nation. It will create giantized cankers of cities, false opulence of suburbs, ruinized countryside, and unhealthy conglomerates of specialized farming and manufacturing. It will make every man a tyrant.”
The car, now with its own house, physician, insurance and personal servant, may prove our toughest nut to unscrew.
Judy Loest
Knoxville
King Coal Unearthed
Great article [“Coal Dust,” April 8]. I have been told that Tennessee is largely agrarian, but it is always amazing to me to hear about these parts of Tennessee and Kentucky that are so geographically and socially isolated.
Jesse Morton
Knoxville
Poetic People
Thanks for the great story [April 8] on the Coal Creek theater piece. I hope that your staff and the Actors Co-op realize how important this play can and will be for the people of this region. My grandmother and great grandmother worked for days preparing food for the rescuers at the mine site. I grew up hearing stories about the sound of the horn sounding from the mine and everyone running miles to reach the site. These stories so visual that to this day a sharp whistle or horn will make me jump.
My family and I always said that our mother was a feminist before the word was coined. I think that this disaster helped sharpen our mother’s life and sharpen each one of my brothers’ and sisters’. Our family, when discussing our ancestry, always recall the following:
“We are mountain people,
We are a boorish set,
They tell us—Hard bitten, coarse of feature and speech,
Shallow and brawling as the mountain streams,
With morale frail as our sandstone.
All my life I have wanted to tell them:
That we are mountain people,
That mountain streams have pools of deep quietness.
And beneath the sandstone of our hills there is granite!”
—S.E., Tennessee poet
I hope with your reporting and the Actors Co-op play that they will all know the above. Many, many thanks.
Bob L. Davis & extended family
Knoxville
Angel in Our Midst
Enjoyed your article on the upcoming [Measured in Labor: The Coal Creek Project] theatrical project.
William B. Angel, who died in the Fraterville Mine disaster, is buried at Old Gray Cemetery in Knoxville.
His birth was Dec. 4, 1851.
Alix Dempster
executive secretary
Old Gray Cemetery
Knoxville
Ridiculous Offal!
I read Betty Burks’ [April 1] letter about Metro Pulse status as “weird publication” with some interest. “Not for Normal Folks” was proclaimed above her letter. Although I don’t think it’s just weird people who read it, I wonder, who actually does read Metro Pulse? Clearly MP readers don’t live in West Knoxville, even though that’s where the advertisers are (a rough count showed that 60 of the 133 ads in the paper were for West Knox establishments). I guess the readership is “working class?”, college-educated, extremely negative people. Witness the ridiculous [April 1] offal, “West Knoxingtonville,” which parodies the influx of places like Turkey Creek and that monstrosity planned for Pellissippi and Northshore. If these places are as banal and colorless as you claim, surely your writers can come up with some better way to criticize them. And the parody itself is about as lame as you could get, anyway.
Yes, West Knoxville is mostly white and Protestant. So what? Practically the whole damn county is. I’m sure the ethnically diverse writers and staff at MP have noticed that. Even the entertainment writing in MP shows this negative attitude. Recent example: it isn’t OK to tell everyone how great Jim Lauderdale is; you must also tell everyone what a dumb ass they are for enjoying Kenny Chesney. As far as I’m concerned, Jack Neely—aside from his obsession for the “-ington” names of Knoxville subdivisions—is the best thing MP has going. Even though the “KnoxINGTONville” suggests he had a hand in writing the parody (which unsurprisingly no one claimed), his Secret History is the only reason I pick up the rag anymore. I don’t expect MP to extol the virtues of WK. Knoxville needs a strong downtown. But I don’t see why the current tactic of “WK sucks, Downtown rocks, and so does every other place in our area that isn’t dominated by upper middle-class people” has to be so negative in its orientation.
Thomas P. Karnowski
Knoxville
April 15, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 16
© 2004 Metro Pulse
|
| 
