Time and Distance Overcome

Time and Distance Overcome

Telephones and mobiles are great devices for communication, and almost every household in America own a phone. They are used all the time, and these "shallow" conversations are more frequent than the real face-to-face conversations. Being a very civilized country, America is disturbingly far behind in communication between races and different classes, and they invent new articles to become greater than everybody else, while they have extremely serious problems in the core of the inventions. These problems are discussed in the essay Time and Distance Overcome.

The essay is written in 2008 by the author Eula Biss. Time and Distance Overcome is clearly divided into three parts, which are separated in a most obvious way. The two first parts are mainly facts and stories, however, the last part is a short personal story from the author's own life and experiences. I would call the first part "The Telephone War", because it describes the invention of the telephone and the reactions that followed the invention. All this is described in a light and cheery way, and the reader is lulled into a false sense of security and happiness. We hear about Bell: The man who invented the telephone, and his struggles to promote his article. People were in general very suspicious towards the unknown and dangerous telephone, even though it provided them with remarkable possibilities in communication. People started The Telephone War, where they cut down a lot of telephone poles. They thought the poles were ugly and scarred the beauty of the landscape and the city. The telephone company responded by assigning one man to each pole, where he would stand on the top of the pole, preventing people from cutting it down.

Biss describes this war as silly and funny, but from one sentence to another, the mood changes drastically. "The telephone, Thomas Edison declared, annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch. In 1898, in Lake Comorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole." (l. 63). What once was a rather cheerful and funny essay, suddenly becomes a dark and frighteningly real story. I would call this part of the essay "The Racial Telephone War". Biss starts talking about 'lynching', an act where mobs execute people violently in public. Not criminals or murderers, but black people. The black people are brutally killed for deeds they may or may not have done, and they are hung from the newly placed telephone poles. The essay switches from one example to another, and as a reader you become rather nauseous from reading this fact-based horror story. The telephone was used as a communication between people all over the world, and it was mostly for quite unnecessary conversations: "A Boston banker paid for a private line between his office and his home so that he could let his family know exactly when he would be home for dinner." (l. 22). By using the poles as gallows, a whole new