Typeface and Business Identity

As an office temporary in Chicago fresh out of high school, I often found I wasn’t content to simply edit letters for people’s business correspondence. Sometimes I experimented with formats or how ideas were separated into paragraphs. Certain sentences, I discovered, helped present an idea more effectively heading up the following paragraph instead of ending the previous one, and vice-versa.

But the most fun I ever had in an era when office typists were just wading into the computer age was changing the fonts on the documents. I was pretty bold about it, too, no pun intended. I would just traipse into the boss’s office with a handful of letters that I had globally changed from Helvetica to Verdana or Geneva, or from Times Roman to a different serif font, say, Palatino, Georgia, or my favorite, Century Schoolbook. The boss would frown at the typeface but generally wouldn’t say anything. Something was different, but he couldn’t quite figure out what. I really liked Garamond a lot. It made me think of the Renaissance, and using it made me feel like royalty. This is probably because it was created in 16th-century France for the king by Claude Garamond, in contrast with Times New Roman, designed by Stanley Morison for the Times of London in 1929. When you know what you like right away, it’s most efficient to simply make your choice without putting too much thought into it, but upon comparing both fonts I become aware that at least two characteristics of Garamond make it easier to read than Times New Roman.

First, because the strokes of the letter forms are thinner, Garamond letter forms are granted a thicker cushion of white space. (Remember white space, the advertiser’s dream?) Secondly, lower case letters are less than half the height of the capital letters, whereas Times New Roman lower case are greater than half the height of its capital letters.

These qualities of a nearly 500-year-old typeface apparently have another advantage over the more modern Times New Roman. Last week, a 14-year-old Pittsburgh sixth grader calculated that switching from Times New Roman to Garamond could save his school 24% of its toner budget. Suvir Mirchandani then thought about state and federal tax forms printed by the Government and calculated that (depending who you ask) switching to the older font could save the government in total anywhere between $136 million and $467 million annually, between 30–60% of printing costs.

One or two skeptics insist that the youngster failed to consider font size discrepancies, offset lithography and other complexities of adult business practices. Oh well, Mr. Mirchandani. So much for proposing tax savings strategies to the IRS.

My own fascination with fonts never did much for my career as an office temporary. People I worked for always seemed to find something unsettling about me, but they couldn’t quite figure out what. Maybe I should have taken up accounting.

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(Special thanks to Forbes online, The Guardian and other local news sites and bloggers I linked to in this post.)

Divorce Culture: Why Men Rape

When we hear the phrase “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” we tend to think of Adolf Hitler. Though some of us attribute the quote to historian and moralist Lord Acton, whose full name was John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834–1902), the idea of someone’s utter corruption through unchecked authority was also remarked on by French poet Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine (1790-1869) and prior to that, by William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778). These men may have believed they were talking about abuse of power in government, referring specifically to those individuals with the authority and influence to subject others to their wills, including slaveowners. Certainly they had no reason to consider women.

It may be helpful to understand that, in every state except for New Jersey, American women lost the right to vote nearly 150 years before they won it back. In 1776, John Adams responds to his wife’s letter of two weeks prior, writing:

We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented.

Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems…. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.

This was because she asked him, several months prior to the birth of a new nation in 1776, to “remember the ladies.”

Male privilege has a way of fading into shades of gray. In history books depicting men of different nations shooting and stabbing each other in the rise to power, the struggles of women may seem insignificant. Rape of women of all ages seems justifiable, even a cultural tradition. An Australian study shows that in Papua, New Guinea, gender based violence (GBV) is a problem with widespread social and economic impact. The study finds that:

There is a discrepancy in the level of reporting of violence between the women and men surveyed in Bougainville, with men reporting a higher prevalence of intimate partner violence than women. This difference is a reminder of the inherent challenges in gathering this type of data. The report suggests a number of reasons for this: that in contexts in which partner violence is rela­tively normalized, there is less shame and stigma for men to admit perpetrating violence than for women to admit experiencing it; where impunity is common, women’s fear of further violence is likely greater than men’s fear of legal repercussions; and that men (and women) may fail to recog­nize the coercive nature of their (or their partner’s) behavior when it comes to sex within marriage.

Gender violence against women has proven to have negative economic impact on societies worldwide. A researcher named Olufunmilayo I. Fawole asserts that economic violence leads to a deepening of poverty, and asserts that governments should assist in its prevention.

So, why do men rape? An informal study on AskReddit in July 2012 generated interesting admissions from the rapists themselves. A more recent survey suggests “the answers…lie in correcting the mindset that leads to such incidents.” Myths about rape and even pregnancy during rape, interestingly enough, are perpetuated by the government, or men in power. One of the myths is that rape is about sex or love when it is really about one person gaining power over another. This is one reason why men rape children.

If a legal system isn’t in place to educate men and tell them rape is wrong, that it’s socially unacceptable; if it instead reinforces cultural messages depicting women as the property of men to be used sexually, then the United States will wind up in a third-world economic predicament because the women have no rights to property or even to their own bodies.

As Abigail Adams wrote to her husband in 1776, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. … That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute….” These words are true today, along with the saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

(Special thanks to the bloggers and news sources to whom I’ve linked their contributions to this post.)

Letter to the Commanding Officer of a Deadbeat Dad

I am writing to thank you for your recent transfer of CW NAME WITHHELD to Washington State so that child support can be assessed. I appreciate the U.S. Army’s commitment to serving American families.

There remain two factors that continue to impede collection of child support from the soldier father and these are that 1) he is able to make changes to his legal state of residence regardless of where he is stationed for the sake of avoiding prosecution and 2) that he earns too much money. These factors impede child support collection attempts in two ways that I will explain below.

I first sued CW NAME WITHHELD for child support in Texas in 2009 but my attorney forced me to nonsuit the case 14 months later after giving CW NAME WITHHELD time to change his state of residence on his LES form and claiming all prior forms were shredded and the military was not obliged to provide information as to his state of residence. I can make court documents available to you proving this is what he did. He is now paying his Utah lawyer an undisclosed sum of money to influence judges in Utah to hold hearings denying me due process and refusing to withdraw my petition for child support in Utah for it to be handled in Washington. Again, there is confusion as to where CW NAME WITHHELD lives: is it Washington State or is it Utah? Only his commanding officer in the U.S. Army knows for sure, and we need answers.

While it is obviously up to the soldier’s own discretion how he spends his salary and bonuses and it is also his choice whom he hates, a soldier cannot be trusted to faithfully serve his country when he deprives his own family basic financial support and shows contempt to the mother of his children, as CW NAME WITHHELD has done for five and a half years and continues to do.

The Tuition Project

We called them “ETs.” They shuffled and stared. They seemed like they didn’t belong. Before we understood the march of time and the toll each passing year exacts on human life, it was easier to look at these wizened, prune-like creatures as aliens in an environment they couldn’t navigate. We saw them as someone else’s problem and made jokes about them. Then they became our problem.

The aged became one of several challenges we could tackle in The Tuition Project, a two-year mission to pay for junior college. We had grant writing and business planning classes in high school to help us with proposals. Teens who wanted to get bachelors’ degrees could write five-year applications. Student loans were something our parents had access to before the powers-that-be decided massive consumer debt was a bad investment. Now, the federal government began to see youth as an undervalued asset to rebuilding the nation.

From middle-school through high-school, my classes were taught by career people volunteering one day a week or two days a month to share their practical knowledge. High school dropout rates went down once school began to have a real-world context.

Two friends who graduated in my class went into environmental solutions and waste management. One really smart girl I knew wrote a proposal for infrastructure, and she went to work upgrading the power grid. Some of my older cousins in their late 20’s have pretty good jobs at companies that found out about them through their Tuition Project programs. They all went on to complete their masters’ degrees in night school, and some of them are going to teach high school part time.

Old Mark tells me about the bad old days when I wait with him for his ride. Everything was driven by debt back when he was my age. His sunken eyes tell a sad story I can hardly believe. The economy was so bad people’s homes were getting foreclosed and neighborhoods were falling apart. People had jobs, but no one stayed in them for very long. How can anyone run a country like that? I wondered. Old Mark said long ago, his parents told him to save his money, but that was impossible.

The ETs always smile when my friends and I come along, because we make going places feel like a party. I designed an elderly transport system like a tour of the city, and we pass statues and other landmarks on the way to the hospital and the grocery store. The ETs seem to like that a lot.

My partners and I have gotten great results with our Elderly Transport program. We work with the physical therapists sometimes to fit into their schedules. Getting an ET to smile at you is better than money, but it makes me happy to know two things for sure. That when I get out of here, my college tuition will be paid, and that at least five companies I’ve worked with will have good job openings for me.

Abolish Marriage

Marriage is not for everyone. Ellen Degeneris recently reassured PEOPLE Magazine that she and her wife Portia De Rossi, both women, are happy together, quieting rumors of their pending divorce. One conservative lawmaker in January moved to outlaw marriage altogether in Oklahoma to prevent same sex couples from marrying, but those that marry legally in other states face the same pitfalls as heterosexual couples.

Roughly half of all marriages end in divorce. Of those that don’t, one of the partners may be caught in a coercive cycle where the other party dictates all the rules and holds all the power. Churches reinforce the time-honored tradition that makes the woman subordinate to her husband. The Bible says Eve was created for Adam. But, is marriage a “license to rape”?

As a social institution, marriage existed before the founding of this country. Americans inherited matrimonial law from British common law and the Napoleonic (French Civil) Code. In the 1970s, it was successfully argued that the “spousal exemption” did not give equal protection from rape to all women, resulting in marital rape becoming a crime in all 50 states the day after Independence Day, 1993.

Matrimonial reform has dovetailed through American history with the abolition of slavery, since it was commonly assumed that a man owned his wife. During the civil war period, a woman in Massachusetts named Ernestine Rose compared a man’s wife to his horse. “By law, they are both considered his property,” she said. “Both may when the cruelty of the owner compels them to run away, be brought back by the strong arm of the law….” Rose protested the ruling of Chief Justice Matthew Hale of 17^th Century England, who stated, “(through marriage) the wife hath given herself up… unto the husband which she cannot retract,” making divorce, or emancipation, impossible. Allowing women to divorce is one of the reforms made on the flawed, broken institution we call marriage.

The stigma of divorce on women appears to have faded over the past few decades, yet Barry Goldstein finds that single mothers continue to bear unequal social and financial burdens, with 50% of the homeless being women and children who have left abusers. The Married Woman’s Property Act, passed in New York State in 1848 was one of the first to grant divorced women and widows any property rights. Goldstein finds the treatment of women in American family courts today remains a fundamental civil rights issue. As women struggle to emancipate themselves from domestic violence and marital coercion through divorce, our society continues to reinforce the message that women are to be used and abused by men.

Marriage may be a useful tool for the census, but it is not meeting the needs of the family. The real problem may be the commitment of American fathers to supporting their families without coercion. With the gender bias passed down from English matrimonial law, American marriage may be causing more social problems than it solves. Until we achieve family reform, marriage is probably not for anyone.

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