The Counterpublic Papers vol. 2 no. 18

At one point in time Michigan had the largest number of bowling alleys per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Maybe the world.

Makes a lot of sense right? Bowling is a particular type of working class pastime, though I don’t know if it necessarily started out like that, that “naturally” evokes working class solidarity…the type associated with labor unions. And as working class populations grew both the number and size of bowling alleys grew…from bowling alleys that had maybe five or six lanes, to behemoths that had 128. And just as plants grew in size and became more technologically sophisticated, so too did bowling alleys…shifting from employing kids to pick up and re-align the pins (and send the bowling ball back to the bowler) after every frame, to automating the process. I know that in the Metropolitan Detroit area the bowling alley was one of the places blacks and whites socialized in the same space, competing against and with each other, drinking together, etc. I imagine the same had to be true in other places. In 2000 Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone trying to get at the community and the “social capital” that America previously had but lost. The analogy was kind of antiquated though. I’m not sure if someone saw the title now, almost a couple of decades later, they would know what he meant. There’s been a hipster-ish attempt to revitalize bowling alleys, and I think they still show bowling on ESPN but it’s probably on tape delay. Mark Roth and Earl Anthony (the best professional bowlers of my era) weren’t necessarily Magic Johnson and Larry Bird to me but they were up there. 

Now? Not so much. 

It’s been some years since I picked Bowling Alone up but, likely because he wasn’t really examining bowling per sé, he didn’t really go into depth about the economics behind why people weren’t bowling as much. I think it’s because the profit margins didn’t hold up. I imagine bowling alleys remained (and remain) profitable, but the larger the bowling alleys were the larger the space required to house them. And although bowling alleys served a valuable social, cultural, and political function, they also served an economic function. Owners had to make money. And while the owners could and did add all types of little bells and whistles—Satellite Lanes, the bowling alley I frequented as a kid, had a restaurant with a liquor license and over two dozen pinball machines and video games(in fact Satellite Lanes was the first place I saw and played Space Invaders, Pac Man, Galaxian, Centipede, and Defender)—they couldn’t get the types of profit from that space they could from other types of venues. 

A Home Depot now sits where Satellite Lanes once stood. Over the past twenty years the number of bowling alleys have shrunk from about 5500 to just a shade over 4000. 

Cloverlanes was one of the few big bowling alleys left in the Metropolitan Detroit area. The people I bowled with as a child transitioned to that lane after Satellite closed down, and when I would come back home I’d stop by there to visit them. You can see what’s left in the picture above. 

It’s being replaced by a Self-storage facility. 

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I got a chance to see Hidden Figures over the weekend. Based on the book of the same name It tells the story of three African American women who were largely responsible for the intellectual innovations required to put Americans in space and on the moon. Before (and then just as) NASA was turning to mainframes provided by IBM to make calculations they used people—before the term “computer” became associated with the device I’m using to write this (and you’re using to read this) computers were people who were given the task of making calculations, often by hand. And they had a wing of black women computers. The movie focuses on three of them—one of them responsible for transitioning NASA to using mainframe computers, one of them responsible for calculating John Glenn’s orbit around the earth as well as the two Apollo moonshots, one of them responsible for helping NASA work through problems with heat shield development. I had a chance to meet the book’s author at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists. All three women were members of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and the author basically grew up under one of them. 

These two interviews tell part of the tale. With a couple of exceptions, there’s a large disconnect between the civil rights movement and the cold war. We know that one of the reason some refuse to take the CIA/FBI accounts about Russian interference in the US presidential election seriously is because of fifties era redbaiting, a phenomenon that ended up hamstringing the civil rights movement in more ways than one. We also know that the civil rights movement was successful was in part because the US didn’t want Jim Crow racism to reduce their odds of ideologically defeating the Soviet Union. But landing a man on the moon was about as far away from the Montgomery Bus Boycott in most people’s minds than it’s possible to get. 

(There’s an exception. Gil Scott Heron’s Whitey on the Moon. Although come to think of it, it's not really an exception.)

There was a time when it wasn’t possible to tell a story like this one even on cable television. Thirty years ago the stories told about the civil rights movement focused on whites and their effort to fight for black rights, a trend best exemplified in Mississippi Burning. That trend hasn’t quite died, but it’s dying. While a number of whites play important roles, we never see them outside of the workplace and we rarely see them by themselves. Though we do see them take steps to fight against Jim Crow—after Katherine Johnson made it clear that the reason she disappeared for over forty minutes at a time everyday was because she had to use the colored women’s restroom on the other side of NASA, her boss desegregated the facility—but these steps always come as a result of black action. Further there was a time when it wasn’t possible to tell a story like this without focusing on black men. I’m pretty sure the Bechdel test was broken within the first fifteen minutes or so of the film.        

With this said there were problems. The same problems we see in black politics writ large—a subtle emphasis on respectability politics, little to no internal variation within black communities, and a conception of racism as a peculiar sort of market inefficiency (if NASA engineers would’ve just recognized black capacity in the first place NASA would’ve functioned so much better). But I’d see it again. 

As an aside there’s a quick nod to the Challenger if you look quick enough.

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Ben Carrington is a sociologist at UT-Austin and he’s been conducting a series of interviews with people about the late Stuart Hall. I listened to the episode featuring Imani Perry and you should check it out if you get the chance. With the political transition I’d imagine we’re going to have more work interrogating the “black public intellectual” alongside the plethora of work tasked to understand Obama. I agree with Perry when she says it’s hard to overestimate Hall’s influence on intellectual development in the United States. However, and I think I’ve written as much here before, I think giving Hall the credit he deserves requires really wrestling with the abrupt turn scholars like bell hooks and Cornel West make in the early nineties. Once it becomes possible to make 25K in a speech the concept of the “public” changes doesn’t it? 

….

We now live in an America where it’s simultaneously possible for a movie like Moonlight to get a Golden Globe for Best Drama, a television show like Atlanta to get Best Comedy (and Donald Glover get best Actor in a Comedy), an actor like Viola Davis to get an award for Fences….and have Donald Trump be president. 

Strange times.