Poor infrastructure breeds its own etiquette

Lamenting the recent rash of pay-to-jump-the-line enticements pushed by amusement parks and ski resorts as well as airlines, "Matthew J.X. Malady" (that's a pseudonym, right?) writes an eloquent tribute to the eroding social achievement of the queue:

This process [of forming lines] may not be fun, but it’s fair. Curse lines all you like, but we would be doomed without them. Unless you’re simultaneously the strongest, smartest, fastest and most universally capable human being on the planet, you should be thankful that lines exist and that, for the most part, people use them in ways that make life less miserable, not more. Which is to say the line is not a persistent social nuisance. It’s one of our most noble collective achievements.

I came to this via Timothy Noah, Jeremiah of inequality, and was led in a Twitter exchange to think about a relative bright spot where the new classism has not yet penetrated: commuter trains. I ride New Jersey Transit into Penn Station in New York, a prime example of inadequate U.S. infrastructure which, on the plus side, has induced regular commuters to develop their own complex, site-specific queuing etiquette.

Yes, Team of Rivals was Tony Kushner's "principal source" for Lincoln

I came to  Michael Vorenberg's Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001) via Timothy Noah, who suggested in a New Republic  "best books" listicle  that this book was likely the unacknowledged main source of the movie Lincoln,  In a Jan. 10 followup, Noah notes that "Lincoln isn't adapted in any meaningful way from its nominal source, Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals, which despite its many virtues dedicates only a few pages to the film's central narrative--the passage of the 13th amendment to the Constitution" and that Final Freedom is "a book rich in narrative detail that [screenplay author Tony] Kushner surely feasted on."

I finished Final Freedom yesterday, after a slow read, noting points of convergence and divergence with the movie along the way. A week or two ago, I reread Goodwin's four pages on the House's passage of the thirteenth amendment in January 1865. And what struck me right away -- and now again as I read those pages again -- is that the film's narrative shape and thematic focus bear a much closer resemblance to Goodwin's short hero's narrative than to Vorenberg's richly detailed, polyphonic tic-toc.

Preparing to write that thought up, I went to TNR to pull Noah's article and discovered that he has gone on something of a quest to get Tony Kushner to acknowledge a debt to Vorenberg. In a followup,  Noah spoke to both Kushner and Vorenberg.  Kushner acknowledges having read Final Freedom, and praises it warmly, but denies that it was a primary source. Reading his response was for me a case of reading more or less what I was about to write. So..me first! -- it's my blog. Then, Kushner and Vorenberg.

The xpostfactoid service employee mandate

I confess to be swayed back and forth a bit by an online debate. I more or less assented to Timothy Noah's brief against Pret-a-Manger, a counter food chain that takes training its employees to be friendly and engaging to perhaps new extremes:

Pret keeps its sales clerks in a state of enforced rapture through policies vaguely reminiscent of the old East German Stasi. A "mystery shopper" visits every Pret outlet once a week. If the employee who rings up the sale is appropriately ebullient, then everyone in the shop gets a bonus. If not, nobody does. This system turns peers into enthusiasm cops, further constricting any space for a reserved and private self. And these cops require literal stroking. In other workplaces, touching a co-worker may get you fired, but at Pret you have to worry about not touching co-workers enough. "The first thing I look at," Chief Executive Clive Schlee told The Telegraph last March, "is whether staff are touching each other . . . I can almost predict sales on body language alone...

Space invaders in politics

About that hand that Romney laid on Perry during their talk-over-each-other battle in the Vegas debate: the Washington Post's Ann Gerhart finds experts who claim that violating the other's space in a debate is always a no-no:

But the debate stage has its own set of rigid rules of engagement, the most important being: Keep your hands to yourself. You can shake hands before and clap a rival on the back after — and even kiss Rep. Michele Bachmann on the cheek — but never, ever make a move on the other guy.

As Democrats tank, Is Stephen J. Rose rebounding? Will Obama?

As the Democrats stare at disaster, is Stephen J. Rose finally getting some traction?

An economist former Clinton Administration official, Rose has been crying in the wilderness that Democrats overestimate middle class distress and pitch their programs and rhetoric too much at the disadvantaged, ignoring the broad, relatively prosperous middle of American society. Democrats do not cotton to his rebuttals to assertions that the middle class is  "disappearing" or"drowning in debt" or his critiques of work by Elizabeth Warren and Jacob Hacker propounding those ideas.

Rose's book Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger from the Financial Crisis got a plug from David Brooks just prior to publication this past April, but my impression is that it's been largely ignored otherwise. My customer review on Amazon, posted on May 10 (here on xpostfactoid), remains the only one, and the book's Amazon sales rank is 305,456.  By contrast, Richard Florida's the The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, published two weeks after Rebound and listed by Amazon as a Rebound comparable, has 15 customer reviews and a sales rank of 10,950.

Perhaps it's coincidence, but Rose's theses popped up on my screen twice yesterday. The first is a shadow appearance. Joshua Green gave a platform to Chuck Schumer, who here expounds pure Rose: