Domestic Flight

                                                                       

Domestic Flight

     Good housekeeping? What, the magazine? Housekeeping, the novel by Marilyn Robinson?  Or do you mean cleaning house, Martha Stewart’s favorite topic? Sorry, but I never enjoyed it. By my twenties I understood the saying, “Housework is never noticed until it isn’t done.” My daughters clean regularly to feel better about their surroundings and themselves, which is a mystery to me. I prefer detachment, mind over matter.

       For forty years now I have lived in an old hatchery, a real redwood tribute to family and fertility, a conversion my second husband had almost completed on the day he walked out.  I finished the exterior with my own DIY shingling job and found it more satisfying than other chores, certainly more fun than housework.  Under the topic ‘More Fun’ I would also include traveling, knitting, gardening, reading, writing, you name it.

    Perhaps my aversion to domestic maintenance is connected to my Anglo ancestors and their bookish disregard for household routine. Consider this quote from Quentin Crisp, by his own account “one of the stately homos of England” and author of The Naked Civil Servant as he described maintaining his flat, “There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years, the dirt didn’t get any worse.”  Closer to home, the American comedian Phyllis Diller said, “Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance.” and “I’m eighteen years behind on my ironing.”   My guru Phyllis also said, “Cleaning the house before your children are grown is like shoveling snow in the middle of a blizzard.”

      Much of the comedy at the beginning of the Women’s Movement was based on a resistance to the notion that women should be happy with housework. Women in the 1960s were not expected or really welcome in the marketplace.  I view those comediennes who first mocked housekeeping and the traditional views of women (Diller, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, and later Roseanne Barr) as pioneers. Back then, unfortunately, many of their jokes mocked women themselves, their bodies, or their status as housewives.  What their humor offered then was another point of view, resisting the life of the household drudge. The dutiful housewife sends her children outside rather than risk their “tramping dirt in the house.” She does not listen to them or cuddle them; she is cleaning.

      On weekends I like Book TV and recently watched a speech by Cambridge scholar Ha-Joon Chang, who said, “The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet.”  He was referring to how appliances and other technical advances have improved the daily lives for half the planet: women.  I suspect that many men have benefited from these home advances as well. Consider that great American soul, Henry David Thoreau, who lived simply in a state of nature, but still found doing his laundry so distasteful that he left Walden Pond every week to take a bundle of soiled clothes to his mother for her to wash. Was this transcendence?

      For another example of a man’s view of the laundry, I recently read a review by Rachel Aviv of Peter Trachtenberg’s The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and its Meaning, where the author disclosed that once “he attempted suicide because at the moment it seemed more appealing than folding laundry.” Modern life has wrested hours out of every day once taken up with scrubbing and sweeping, duties that now require only minutes.

      I would add the obvious corollary that clothes dryers have changed the world as well. I refer here not just to finishing the laundry, but also to the use of the dryer as a substitute for ironing. Very few women iron anymore. Now they use hand held steamers or the dryer to fluff their clothes to rid them of major wrinkles. I iron perhaps two or three times a year now, but then that’s just me. Millions of women count every minute away from the ironing board as blessed.

      As a child I watched my working mother rush through her tidying, tossing any stray items into a hamper or onto a clothes hook in the closet, saying “Out of sight, out of mind,” and that became my maxim.  I can count all the homes of my childhood and the apartments of my twenties by the secret hiding places I made, laundry being my first ‘dirty little secret,’ with ironing a close second.  At my worst I used a screened porch for this task, a space reserved for an old washer and a dirty clothesbasket. I didn’t want my children wearing dirty clothes, so I did laundry frequently.

      My husband believed he could speed things up by creating a drain where the landlord had not. Instead of hiring a plumber, my spouse drilled a hole in the floor, bent over, and inserted the washer’s drain hose into the new aperture. This project was probably the masculine equivalent of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ However, when bamboo began to sprout through the gap and the heater vents, he decided it was time to move to the country. This is the same ex who left while building my place, but that’s another story.

      Early motherhood extended my inattention to domestic duties.  Hiding my freshly laundered clothes was my greatest flaw as a housewife.  This practice frustrated my daughters, but they eventually learned to retrieve and to iron, then to hate ironing, and finally to go to the cleaners or use a dryer to ‘fluff their stuff.’ More than once over the years I dedicated an entire room to contain my family’s clean, but un-ironed garments. When it was clear that certain items had not been worn in six months or more, I bagged them up and took them to the Goodwill. I saw this as a good thing. I felt clean, organized, and charitable.

      When my children were in elementary school I set up the ironing board in front of the TV and we all watched PBS for our edification, or Soul Train for their footwork, and the distraction kept me from noticing how awful ironing was. The children were safe with me as I held court there beside the clean clothesbasket. If I began the same duties in solitude, I would daydream, get weepy, or mutter to myself as I suspect generations of women did before me. So I began listening to my radio’s mix of news and music as I worked.  Now I have changed my loyalty to NPR—such loyalty that I cannot bear to be distracted by ironing and all the disciplined dedication that it requires.

      Ah well, let us change the subject and move on to closets. Let me peek inside …perhaps not.  Very few readers are old enough to remember Fibber McGee opening his radio closet, but I can still hear the clickety-clatter and clashing cymbals as all the contents came crashing down in those old broadcasts. My closets are not that bad or that congested.

    Perhaps it is better to discuss the kitchen, which is an area where I can truly say that I have shown improvement over time. This was not always the case. Since my culinary skills have not increased over all my years of cooking, I burn a pot every now and again. I always soak it. Why linger over the dishes if you have to toss dinner in the garbage? I say scrape and toss the scorched contents, soak the pot, and make a quick salad. My first husband had a problem with this rule, and, come to think of it, so did the second. Hmmm, I think I’m discovering something here.

     Men of my generation did not help with the dishes, and did not cook, either. So why should I have revealed where I put the soaking pot?   How long it had been there? Please.  I chose the oven for the first day or so.  When I suddenly encountered it after an unplanned delay, the odor was always a surprise. Then I would take it outdoors to toss the stuff not already welded to the sides of the pan into the garden and return to scour it. This process left just the burned residue, which in turn called for another soaking, another hiding place. One needs to be resourceful when choosing a different spot… the back porch, maybe.

      When I went to deliver my son in 1964, the hospital stay was five days, and my mother-in-law came over to help by cleaning my house. She discovered a sequestered soaking pot after it emitted a low belching sound from the bottom of the storage shelves on the back porch, and saw its bubbling and frothing away as the sign of growing bacteria and all around negligence.  There was no end to the story. The pot was still waiting for me when I got back home with the new baby.

     I am a responsible, daily dishwasher, and also have a novel way of washing the floor. I recently scanned through a November 2010 issue of Good Housekeeping, and found an article on Jamie Lee Curtis and her super-organized home. She is systematic, but still manages one bit of kitchen cleanup the same way I do: she scrubs her floor by using damp white cleaning cloths under her dancing feet. I did this forty years ago, telling my children what fun it was and then suddenly we were all together in the kitchen skating around on ragged old towel scraps with the radio up, laughing at each other’s moves.  With the children grown, cleanup is once again a solitary venture, which may be a clue as to why any social being would hate being confined to the domestic front. Females are not homebound anymore.

       When I was a kid, I only had to help my mother out—to play a small part in a larger team. When I married at twenty, a whole mountain of household maintenance tasks fell on my shoulders, in addition to my job and then childcare. I developed a rash after a few months of washing dishes, a dermatitis that erupted under my wedding ring and spread upwards.  After one dermatologist described it as dishpan hands, the allergy grew worse and worse. The light began to dawn on me that something could be wrong with my life when the rash approached my armpits.  Years later I got a prescription for hydrocortisone ointment, but in the mid 1960s I was amazed that right after separating from my husband, and tossing that wedding ring down the toilet, the rash disappeared. Possibly it was a better ointment, possibly it was removing the ring that I suspect caused the outbreak, but my cure worked for me.

     As my children went out into the world, I worked toward completing my first goal of becoming a teacher, then switched to school counseling before I retired. I was able to develop a life of reading, traveling, gardening, and having some fun along the way. So in the end, I was not a household drudge. My children turned out to be good people even though I lived my life with a nod to domestic maintenance, not as a slave of it.

for a Dancer

For A Dancer

In November, 1950, all Woolworth’s novelty fabrics went on sale. Mama found a piece of orange tulle left over from Halloween and sent me to find thread to match. She haggled with the sales clerk as soon as I was out of earshot, buying a yard of ivory satin from a larger remnant. My mother counted the change from her two dollars, but it was not enough to buy a pattern.
“What did you buy, Mama?”
“Never mind. It’s a secret. After dinner tonight, I want you to pack up your clothes for the good will. That old swimsuit, for instance.”
“But it still fits. “
“Just put it all in the bag. I’ll figure it out later.”
Fridays Mama usually stayed up late reading, sleeping in late Saturday mornings. I took my bath and was heading off to bed when I noticed her studying my bathing suit and tracing the outline on the new material. Once in my bedroom I heard the sound of her scissors knocking against the kitchen table. Next morning the floor was slippery with satin scraps, and my swimsuit was back on top of my dresser.
That night I woke to find her working on the project again. Seeing me, she spoke sharply: “It’s time you were in bed, little girl.”
When I stirred in my sleep, I heard the whirring of her old sewing machine. She began again right after Sunday dinner, with another early bedtime for me. I woke up after midnight to find her bent over the table, her head on her arms, asleep by the machine next to rows and rows of orange ruffles. Her cigarette had left a long grey cylinder in the ashtray.
My ninth birthday arrived a week later and I opened the box to see my mother’s handiwork wrapped in white tissue. I was proud, but speechless.
“It’s a tutu, honey. It’s what ballerinas wear,” she said.
I wanted to ask if there were shoes as well, but I knew better. I put on the tutu after pressing the satin against my cheek, and Mama, who loved to dance, led me through the five positions as I followed in my bare feet. We whirled and swayed to her Nutcracker record on the phonograph. Crashing on the couch, we went through the ballet book my father gave me, looking together at photos of Maria Tallchief and Alicia Markova.
That Christmas Mama had sat us down to show us her budget—her bills and her income. We learned there that children learned the Santa Claus story, but that it was parents who bought gifts. Mama reminded us that our father was absent, and so our presents would be what she could afford on her salary. Stevie cried.
For Christmas 1950 I got ballet slippers, but there was no money for lessons. Four years later when I was thirteen, my Aunt Nellie paid for a beginners’ class that lasted six weeks. I was lacking whatever passion Mama had for classical dance, so I didn’t press for more instruction in such an ordeal of discipline. Six weeks was quite enough for me in 1955, when dancing changed with Elvis’ gyrations and James Brown’s bold moves.

The Achievement of a Lifetime: Planned Parent

Planned Parenthood: The Achievement of a Lifetime

In reviewing my life, I have witnessed many changes in the world that surprised me, none more so that the transformation of women’s lives between 1960 and 2010. The sexual revolution was not so much a revolution as a reconfiguring of America from one set of anti-obscenity and anti-birth control laws to a different principle establishing sexual privacy as a basic personal right. Many years elapsed between the development of efficient contraceptives and the ordinary woman’s legal access to them. The old laws Anthony Comstock and his Wall Street funders pressed congress to pass in 1873 remained a repressive force until the U S Supreme Court set them aside in 1966. It was at that time that the Court helped my generation, then in their early twenties, decide the number of children we wanted with reliable forms of birth control. For younger women, the changes since the 1970s are simply revolutionary.
Those of us in college in 1960 were born in the late 1930s or early 1940s. In my sophomore year when my friends and I were eighteen and nineteen, a classmate got married, becoming the first in our group to get a prescription for ‘the pill,’ after showing the doctor the announcement of her engagement in the paper. She took Enovid for six weeks prior to her wedding night, the night for which she had saved her virginity. That year also one of our friends died after a botched back alley abortion. I was quietly working my way through school, keeping silent about my stay in an unwed mother’s home in my last year of high school. I put the baby up for adoption, and at my post-partum checkup at the U.C clinic, the doctor refused to give me contraceptives because I was unmarried and only seventeen. These disparate circumstances were very much part of that era: the golden ideal of being a virgin on your wedding night counterposed by the risks of sex out of wedlock and unplanned pregnancy.
By 1964 America’s birth rate had dropped dramatically. Something had changed in the lives of married couples in the USA. 1966 was the first year Planned Parenthood opened clinics in the SF Bay Area, after Title X of the Civil Rights Act 1965 allowed women to get birth control, regardless of income. The idea of sexual privacy had arrived, reaching the highest court in the land, terminating the Comstock Laws that forbade birth control for married couples in 1966. The court spoke again in 1972 when it extended the same right to singles. In the forty years since that time our expectations of personal freedom have changed, altering society’s views of women at home and in the workplace.

Today we are once again threatened with a loss of freedom and privacy in the current attempts by social conservatives to stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood. It is a tragic turn of events, since the use of contraceptives prevents pregnancy, thereby avoiding abortion. If the conservative goal is to reduce or eliminate abortions, the logical position would be the advocacy of personal responsibility to avoid unplanned pregnancy. To eliminate or reduce access to birth control would return us to the Comstock Laws. This goal of social conservatives has everything to do with women, with limiting the free agency of women, with curtailing the sexual expression of women, and restoring traditional matrimony with its attendant risks without much said about self-restraint for men.
If the conservative agenda were truly pro-life, it would foster spending on social programs, like childcare and food stamps, but it does not. For the young and the poor. “Abstinence only” is what conservatives promote, with the consequence being the predictable failure of large numbers of people to restrain their youthful sexual appetites. Spontaneous unprotected sex leads to pregnancy and poverty, to poor families, poor women, and poor children, just as it did in 1729 when Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal.
As a survivor of the bad old days, the last days of the reign of the Comstock Laws, I say, “Give us family planning through Planned Parenthood, please. Give us our privacy and our personal choices as established in Title X.”

Planned Parenthood the achievement of a lifetime

Though Your Dreams Be Tossed And Blown

‘Old songs are the little houses our hearts once lived in.” Ben Hecht



Stories have shaped the minds and hearts of children from the beginnings of humankind. They first bring enchantment, and then they teach. We learn better when there are emotions involved in the telling. My moral life developed as I heard my mother read bedtime stories to me, then I listened to plays and mysteries and songs on the radio, and later went to movies in the days before the ascendancy of television (1946-1955). The movie musical is a visual story enhanced by the lyrics and melody of its songs that produces strong feelings. Of all the musicals I saw as a child I remember in particular The Song of the South, Dumbo, Show Boat, and at the beginning of my adolescence, Carousel.
The first movie musical I recall seeing was Song of the South, but I don’t remember
much. When I heard decades later that Disney had stopped distributing the film because of objections to its political incorrectness and historical inaccuracy, my mind was flooded with visions of my mother and myself tacking up the movie poster as we sang Zipadee doo dah. I fell asleep looking at the picture all that year. My mother talked about how Uncle Remus wanted us all to be happy and to look on the bright side. When I was six and starting first grade at Catholic school, Mama took down Uncle Remus’ picture and put up a crucifix. I began to have nightmares and woke up saying “Mama, they put nails in his hands. I didn’t mean to kill Him!” The crucifix came down and I left Catholic school, bringing an end to my religious instruction. But I didn’t see the poster for Song of the South, disappeared as well.

I did not see Dumbo until its re-release when I was in school. By that time I had had strabismus surgery. Though the operation failed, I was able to see well enough to go to movies or read. In school children mocked my left eye’s slight shift to the right, so when I saw Dumbo, it was from the perspective of one who had already lived with a lot of teasing for looking a little bit different.
Dumbo is an adorable baby elephant with outsized ears whose mother loves him just the way he is. When the other big elephants in the circus tease him, his mother runs amok and is promptly locked up as a ‘Mad Elephant’ in a jail/cage. Mother and baby are forcibly separated until my favorite scene when a little mouse brings Dumbo to her and she reaches her trunk through the bars of her cell to caress her baby, tenderly lift him up, and rock him to the lullaby ‘Baby Mine’. That scene taught me the beauty of a mother’s resistance in her choice to love her baby, no matter what minor differences he might have. I loved how Dumbo’s large ears allowed him the magical gift of flying. It was a lesson not to judge by appearances.
As I grew a little older I lost interest in cartoons because I detested the screaming of the children drowning out the dialogue and story. I looked for more serious movies and an audience quiet enough to let me hear, so in 1951 I went to see Showboat, paying twenty-five cents.
The history of race in America is complex, and at nine years of age, this was my first movie dealing with the topic. I was drawn to the panorama of people on the river, in the fields, and on deck. While there were other characters and sub-plots, Ava Gardner played the major role of Julie Laverne, lead actress on the Cotton Blossom. As she dances and talks, her beauty pulled me into her story’s twists and turns and I was transfixed. I felt concern for most of the characters, but mostly for Julie. Early in the film the Sheriff comes on board looking for her, and announces that he has received information that Julie’s mother was ‘negro’. The news shocked me since Julie looks like a white person with a tan, so I was confused until the lawman speaks of her husband as white and uses the word miscegenation, giving the explanation that the marriage was against the law. Steve quickly pricks Julie’s hand, putting his mouth to her wounded finger, following the old rule that just one drop of African blood makes you ‘Negro.’ As Steve tries to become black to stay with his wife, my nine-year-old mind said, “Yes, we have a solution!”
When the Sheriff refuses to accept the ruse, Steve and Julie have to leave the boat or risk being arrested. As Julie Laverne, green-eyed and gorgeous, walked down the plank and off the boat a half hour into the movie, my world changed and I wept there in my seat. Seeing her stranded on the shore as the steamboat moves down the Mississippi transformed me. There was supposed to be a happy ending for her, just as there was in Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Secret Garden, and Snow White. Why should she be punished and exiled? As the camera pulls away the audience sees Julie and her husband in a carriage moving off screen. At just that point William Warfield begins ‘Old Man River’ and the song underscores the loss.
There’s an old man called the Mississippi
There’s an old man that I long to see
What does he care if the world’s got troubles?
What does he care if the land ain’t free?
He don’t plant taters. He don’t plant cotton.
And them that plants ‘em are soon forgotten
But Old Man River he just keeps rollin’ along

Here is dissonance: Jerome Kern’s music and Oscar Hammerstein’s words. The heart rises with the melody, but the lyric tells us people suffer, inequity exists, and the world remains indifferent. I began to wait for Julie’s return. What would happen to the heroine?
The next week I found another quarter under the bed, and I walked to the theater with my neighbors. Seeing the Technicolor beauty of Showboat and hearing the songs created a feeling of happiness in me from the first frame, then the plot’s unfairness unbalanced me. I had not felt that twist of emotions so deeply before. My heroine did return, and the movie ends with Julie in the shadows of the dock waving at the riverboat, unseen by her friends onboard.
Showboat taught me to care about the people left behind. The lesson I took from the film was to love Julie, not to judge her. I judged the Sheriff and the old law.

In 1956 I took myself to see Carousel, paying fifty cents of my babysitting money when I was fourteen. As the movie opens the orchestrated calliope pumps out the opening waltz with its dizzying changes, and the audience leaps into a day at the fair. Carrie chats about Mr. Snow, her intended, as she and Julie Jordan walk along. We see in the contrast of Carrie and Julie the difference between domesticity and desire. Sexual yearning exists in both males and females, but girls like Julie Jordan want a mate or the right partner.

Julie persuades her girlfriend to go home early in order to get a chance to talk to the carousel barker, Billy Bigelow. In the movie this young man is not so young, and even seems a little seedy with ill-fitting checkered pants. Most girls can identify with Julie Jordan, the ingénue portrayed by the young Shirley Jones. Yet here in the very first scenes something is off, something is wrong with Billy Bigelow that I could see, but Julie could not.
She starts to sing in a light voice a rising melody setting a new and hopeful mood. As Billy speaks he is skeptical and worldly, but I caught glimpses of the endearing qualities Julie sees. She is feminine and gentle, perhaps a little too trusting. As portrayed by the handsome baritone, Gordon McRae, Billy is older, worldlier, saying we are all just 'specks' on a little planet in a larger universe.
On a night like this I start to wonder
What life is all about…
The sky’s so big the sea looks small.
And two little people, you and I,
We don’t count at all.

Hard words, but when Julie begins singing, she is all bright faith where Billy is rash and a little too tough. The story shows the attraction of opposites. So begins the great duet of Carousel, If I Loved You. As the song progresses, one speaks and the other listens. They don’t sing together—they don’t harmonize their parts; each is tentative, wondering whether to lead or to follow- to go on as a separate individual or try being together.

If I loved you
Words wouldn’t come in an easy way
Round in circles I’d go
Longing to tell you, but afraid and shy
I’d let my golden chances pass me by.

This song expresses the dilemma of whether an individual should explore his/her own potential or become part of a couple, a partner in a larger community. Are we tiny motes in a cold night sky or part of the force of nature in a great cosmos? Each phrase is tentative, the melody rises to question and take a chance on the unknown. They both consider the chance of embarrassment if love is not returned or of losing love by not saying anything. If silence is a risk, so is speaking out.
Off you would go
In the mist of day
Never ever to know
How I loved you
If I loved you
Billy and Julie meet and marry; Julie gets pregnant just after Billy loses his job. He dies while taking part in a robbery. This entire relationship takes place in less than two months. The play leaves Julie to face motherhood alone with no money. The films skips ahead fifteen years when Heaven lets Billy visit earth for one day to see his daughter, Louise in time to see local children tease her for being the daughter of a thief. The village doctor speaks at her graduation and tells the youngsters not to be held back by the success or failings of their parents, but to stand on their own and try to be happy. Both mother and daughter hear the advice to hold on, walk on with hope in their hearts.

I was uncomfortable when Billy slaps Julie, and she later claims it didn’t hurt at all. But with this minor quibble aside, I loved the movie. It shows how young women often pick the wrong mate, but carry on to raise their children. Carousel lets us know that love involves risk and teaches us to keep on trying even if our marriage or mate fails us.
Thinking about these films more than fifty years later makes me wonder how memory functions, what we remember and why. Musicals attract our attention through many senses, and the songs and stories stay on our minds, be they good or bad.
Once a memory takes hold, we can question its effects on our later lives. We can ask whether life imitates art or art imitates life. Many believe that memory is selective—the story we choose to tell ourselves, but no one explains why some themes reverberate through our lives and others do not. Why did I focus on people who were different, rage at segregation, marry a black law student when mixed marriage was still against the law? Why did I not anticipate the consequences? When my husband slapped, it hurt, so I left him and found a job to support my children. I took classes for years, and by the time I finished becoming a teacher and a school counselor, I was a grandmother of five. Still I had the satisfaction of finishing the education I had set my heart on.
Did my experience as a child at the movies play a part in my adult choices? Did seeing Dumbo, Carousel, or Showboat set me on my path? Maybe, maybe not. Did these films play a part in shaping my idealism? Absolutely. Their images of courageous women (and mother elephants!) shaped my conscience and kept me going when my dreams were “tossed and blown.”

The songs in these musicals taught me about life and death, love and tolerance. It is the feeling in songs that these movies convey so well, more than just costumes or plot lines. These four movies: Song of the South, Dumbo, Showboat, and Carousel celebrate life while acknowledging its losses and sadness. The courage of the characters left me wanting to change what evil I saw in the world, and led me to care about others no matter their differences.

An Unrelenting tension

Cecile Lusby
429 words
An Unrelenting Tension


Network neutrality may end soon, the SF Chronicle’s Business section warns us.
Todd Shields and Brad Stone begin their discussion of August 15, 2010 with the word imagine. The concepts involved are clouded by corporate practices and techno-jargon, which make for difficult reading and slow processing. But imagine resisting before your attention begins to wander.
In 1985 Stewart Brand wrote, “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive...that tension will not go away.” This tension also stems from the notion of corporate dominance / corporate personhood and the fact that the web serves as a money making vehicle as well as a source of information and communication. Cable companies now want to offer (sell) layered services. Some advances in technology require a broader bandwidth, so cable companies are considering faster service or superior service for some customers, for a price. Google, once a powerful advocate for net neutrality, and Verizon, a phone service and a cable provider, are forming a partnership. Imagine that, Such a partnership likes or wants tiered pricing, as we would expect from phone and cable companies. This development is ominous for ‘neutrality.’ Customers willing to pay will get better stuff; the others, oh well.
The anticipated changes have sent public interest attorneys scurrying. But the prospects for the average internet user are bleak, so exploring this topic is hard. Not just because your eyes travel down the page at a slower pace, but the heart and mind want to be free and resist. Consider the following sentence from Shields and Stone:
“Verizon’s willingness to agree to clear net neutrality rules for its wired business was ‘pleasantly surprising.’” “Clear the rules?” Excuse me? Does this mean ‘ignore the
rules’ or ‘set aside the rules’? The reading bothers me. What is being bargained with here? Is this about the average citizen’s access to information or entertainment.
Paying more to be entertained with a better presentation is fair enough, I suppose, but information and news content are a different matter.
Shall corporations decide this issue? I hope the public interest still matters to us. Free enterprise advocates say that regulations would delay innovation and investment, but the issues involve more than charging extra for special content, such as 3D movies or special sports events, to travel faster on broader bandwidth. The distinction between information and entertainment is crucial to the resolution of this problem. The tension between information being free and information being expensive is similar to the tension between Democracy and Capitalism. Which interests get served; which are wasted.