Time and Distance

Time and Distance Overcome

The text "Time and Distance Overcome" deals with race struggle in the southern United States, in the early nineteen century. Eula Biss starts the text with telling the story of the phone's origin and development and deployment of the telephone network. The racial struggle was a subject that preoccupied many people, especially in the southern states there was cruel scenarios that you cannot even imagine in today's America.

In the first part of the text, it is especially telephone poles that are focused on. It focuses on the development and the growing number of poles and the connections it creates. At the beginning referring Eula Biss there is great skepticism about Graham Bell's new invention, and that it is impossible to make connections so that everyone can get in touch with each other.

Eula Biss describes that after you could have demonstrated the capabilities of the phone, it was an invention that primarily approached to the rich, because it was a "Boston banker", which had installed a private line between his work and his home.

With new things and phenomena that creates always new problems. The U.S. population will also be unhappy with the new poles put up everywhere. Although the public authorities, in the form of judges, gives people the argument that they are within their rights to cut down the new poles and gives prohibition to companies to put more up.

The issue of telephone poles, justifying Elua Biss with: "The War on Telephone Poles was fueled, in part, by terribly American concern for private property and a reluctance to surrender it to a shared utility. And then there was a fierce sense of aesthetics, an obsession with purity, a dislike for the way the poles and wires marred a landscape that those other new inventions, skyscrapers and barbed wire, were just beginning to complicate. And the perhaps there was also a fear that distance, as it had always been known and measured, was collapsing"

So it is the change that part of the population finds problematic, but equally that there must physically be at a telephone pole in front of your soil.

In the second part of the text, it is again the telephone poles that are in focus. Now it's just in a different way - they are the center of the events relating to the killing of black people. It is as Eula Biss also writes, not the telephone poles that are to blame for their attention. That's what they are used for, and this is where she describes them as being terrible because they are being used as tools that help to kill the blacks. She also describes how it has become normal to see black because you can now buy postcards with a negro on fire who have lost large parts of his legs while he was hanging from a telephone pole. However, it will be withdrawn because the postmaster finds it "unmailable".

"The lynching's happened everywhere, all over the United States. From shortly before the invention of the telephone to long after the first trans-Atlantic call. More in the South, and more in rural areas. In the cities and In the North there were race riots.

These race riots forcing about 500 out of their homes, and during the events related to a negro in a pile, but fall down, and this is where a newspaper writes: "Negros are lying in the gutters