Keep arm in
by Bob on August 28, 2007
"Keep Arm In" is on a metal plate on a window in the subway car in Boston. I see it all the time. Obviously, it means keep your arm inside the window whilst traveling so it doesn't get injured. That's quite sensible as a precaution.
But every time I see the sign, and admittedly, in rush hour one does get to spend an inordinate amount of time stuck in the "T" (how the sunway is called in Boston), it plays a trick on my eyes and mind.
I keep seeing it as "Keep Armin'" or slipping one visual letter, "Keep Arming".
Well, that says a lot about the psychology of misheard song lyrics, misread signs, and generally what we could call instrumental Freudian slips (he called them errors).
So this ubiquitous sign keeps telling me "Keep Arming". I figure it has to do with global conflicts that are going on. Either that or a ghost of the Krupp family has inhabited the transit system or my head.
Arms races invariably escalate to a ridiculous point. Then either the world as we know it disappears, or things abate and the parties destroy some otherwise dangerous stockpiles of arms.
Think about it . Arms. We all have two by birth. And the amount of force an army could muster in the very olden days was measured in the number of arms of soldiers involved. That's a useful etymology.
But arms are no longer human arms. They are huge stockpiles of devices which are very complicated and expensive to make and very hard to maintain on the shelf or in the warehouse.
The world-at-large seems to have a plethora of arms of this type which makes for a possibly dangerous ride in life.
Admittedly, also, this is big business. A colleague at university a few years ago said at the dinner table that the largest export of most superpowers was arms. That was a daunting realisation. I thought it might have been grain or peanuts or just simple technology. But apparently not. There also appears to be very few simple technologies left, too. Even coffee makers have complicated general computer chips in them now. Even toilets, although it gets pretty funny and hilarious when they don't work properly.
Escalation seems to be a basic human drive, whether it be videotapes, DVD's, records, megabytes, gigabytes or, yes, arms.
Somewhere in here we are reminded of Parkinson's Law. In essence it says that we will fill up any new space we get quite predictably but very definitely. There will be no room unused, again. And it will contain slop. Excess. Never perused material which takes up room. But we will fill the new bigger size container.
Parkinson actually was originally talking about how much time it would take to do a task, and that work expands so as to fill up the time scheduled for its completion.
So, build a new warehouse or arsenal, and, by definition it will get filled up.
The great leveler here was the harrowing but scientifically brilliant work by Herman Kahn, who I later knew, whose magnum opus was "On Thermonuclear War" back in the 1960s. He also wrote the popular "Thinking the Unthinkable" and other books. Kahn was sanguine about the nuclear arming and escalation. He was the winderkind of nuclear conflict escalation and its outcomes. Some thought Kubrick modeled Dr. Strangelove on Kahn. But one isn't quite convinced of that.
We recall the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer when the first test at the Trinity site took place. He quoted from the ancient text of the Bhagavad-Gita. "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of worlds". And we know what unchecked escalation can potentially bring to mankind.
One also has to remember the brilliant 1905 play by George Bernard Shaw, entitled "Major Barbara". In its deeper triangle of philosophies we have a religious Major in the Salvation Army, oddly enough, and that's Barbara. She is the daughter of a huge arms maker, Mr. Undershaft (what a great pun all this naming of Shaw's) and is in love with a Professor of classic languages, Adophus Cusins. we should recall that "army" is also derived from "arms".
The play teaches us the trade-offs between religion, zealotry, huge business and profits in arms manufacturing, and classical education.
We are also reminded of the warning of President Dwight David Eisenhower who, although he was certainly part of it, warned about the possible out-of-control nature of the Military-Industrial Complex before he left office in 1960. President Eisenhower was not a very simple man or just a golfer as is commonly portrayed. He was a great general of World War II. He knew the price of unbridled war.
But we, frail and tempted human being, seem to always succumb to escalation. Look at the stock market curves. Look at how many videotapes were bought by consumers to record programmes on. Or DVD's. Or batteries for a Walkman. Or carrots. It's part of our nature to escalate.
Moderation is such sweet silence.
All this from a sign in a train car. Semiotics at work. Or even another type of Jung's Synchronicity. Of course.