As noted in another post, May 16-22 is Public Works Week in Appleton. Mayor Woodford has enjoined “citizens and civic organizations to acquaint themselves with the challenges involved in providing our Public Works services, and to recognize the contributions Public Works employees make every day to our health, safety, comfort, and quality of life.”
I think I’m on record saying government is best when it’s focused on boring, unsexy stuff such as roads and sewers. And I have already committed to memory the 3 different ways one can price the water lost from main breaks, but I’m not sure that is a sufficient celebration of Public Works services and employees.
However, Public Works are celebrated within a surprising number of creative and literary endeavours. Here are just a few of the things you can sit down, kick back, and enjoy while celebrating Public Works Week in Appleton and the services and contributions provided by Public Works employees.
In a classic Monty Python bit from “Life Of Brian” half of the positive things the Roman’s are credited with bringing to Judea are Public Works related including sanitation, irrigation, roads, and an aqueduct.
In the book Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, Alobar and Kudra also benefit from aqueducts and tap into Constantinople’s water system in order to conveniently engage in their practice of bathing in extremely hot water, part of their four part system to achieve immortality which also includes daily controlled breathing excercises, regular fasting, and frequent sex.
In the Season 5 episode of the Curious George PBS kids tv series entitled “Follow That Boat”, George helps his friend Steve track down and retrieve the model Egyptian river barge Steve constructed for a school project after it is washed down a water drain. Along the way, George and Steve learn all about how the city’s storm water system works.
Likewise, episode 208 of the Adventures In Odyssey radio series entitled “Pipe Dreams” is devoted fully to teaching kids what the Public Works department does and why it is valuable.
The Honeymooners Season 1 episode entitled “The Man From Space” highlights the sewer system of Paris as well as the work of sewage employees.
Another work that highlights the Parisian sewer system is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. He devotes approximately 500 million words to the history and description of Paris’ sewers and uses it as a setting for some of the chapters of the book.
Finally, in Book 1, Chapter 9 of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounts the story of Public Works engineer V. V. Oldenborger. It took me over a year to make it through all three unabridged volumes of the Gulag Archipelago, and one of the stories that stood out to me was Oldenborgers. All the guy wanted to do was provide quality water service to the city of Moscow and instead he was driven to suicide by communists who went out of their way to prevent his efficiency, then blamed him when the water system broke down and put him on trial for “wrecking” even after he committed suicide.
I couldn’t find a link to that story specifically so I just excerpted it below. One is glad we treat our Public Works employees better than Soviet Russia treated theirs.
The Case of the Suicide of Engineer Oldenborger (Tried before the Verkhtrib — the Supreme Tribunal — in February, 1922)
This case is forgotten, insignificant, and totally atypical. It was atypical because its entire scale was that of a single life that had already ended. And if that life hadn’t ended, it would have been that very engineer, yes, and ten more with him, forming a Center, who would have sat before the Verkhtrib; in that event the case would have been altogether typical. But as it was, an outstanding Party comrade, Sedelnikov, sat on the defendants’ bench and, with him, two members of the RKI — the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection — and two trade-union officials.
But, like Chekhov’s far-off broken harp-string, there was something plaintive in this trial; it was, in its own way, an early predecessor of the Shakhty and Promparty trials.
V. V. Oldenborger had worked for thirty years in the Moscow water-supply system and had evidently become its chief engineer back at the beginning of the century. Even though the Silver Age of art, four State Dumas, three wars, and three revolutions had come and gone, all Moscow drank Oldenborger’s water. The Acmeists and the Futurists, the reactionaries and the revolutionaries, the military cadets and the Red Guards, the Council of People’s Commissars, the Cheka, and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection — all had drunk Oldenborger’s pure cold water. He had never married and he had no children. His whole life had consisted of that one water-supply system. In 1905 he refused to permit the soldiers of the guard near the water-supply conduits — “because the soldiers, out of clumsiness, might break the pipes or machinery.” On the second day of the February Revolution he said to his workers that that was enough, the revolution was over, and they should all go back to their jobs; the water must flow. And during the October fighting in Moscow, he had only one concern: to safeguard the water-supply system. His colleagues went on strike in answer to the Bolshevik coup d’etat and invited him to take part in the strike with them. His reply was: “On the operational side, please forgive me, I am not on strike. … In everything else, I — well, yes, I am on strike.” He accepted money for the strikers from the strike committee, and gave them a receipt, but he himself dashed off to get a sleeve to repair a broken pipe.
But despite this, he was an enemy! Here’s what he had said to one of the workers: “The Soviet regime won’t last two weeks.” (There was a new political situation preceding the announcement of the New Economic Policy, and in this context Krylenko could allow himself some frank talk before the Verkhtrib: “It was not only the spetsy who thought that way at the time. That is what we ourselves thought more than once.”)
But despite this, Oldenborger was an enemy! Just as Comrade Lenin had told us: to keep watch over the bourgeois specialists we need a watchdog — the RKI — the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection.
They began by assigning two such watchdogs to Oldenborger on a full-time basis. (One of them, Makarov-Zemlyansky, a swindler and a former clerk in the water system, had been fired “for improper conduct” and had entered the service of the RKI “because they paid better.” He got promoted to the Central People’s Commissariat because “the pay there was even better”- and, from that height, he had returned to check up on his former chief and take hearty vengeance on the man who had wronged him.) Then, of course, the local Party committee — that matchless defender of the workers’ interests — wasn’t dozing either. And Communists were put in charge of the water system. “Only workers are to hold the top positions; there are to be only Communists at leadership level; and the wisdom of this view was confirmed by the given trial.”
The Moscow Party organization also kept its eyes on the water-supply system. (And behind it stood the Cheka.) “In our own time we built our army on the basis of a healthy feeling of class enmity; in its name, we do not entrust even one responsible posi- tion to people who do not belong to our camp, without assigning them … a commissar.” And so, they all immediately began to order the chief engineer about, to supervise him, to give him instructions, and to shift the engineering personnel around without his knowledge. (“They broke up the whole nest of businessmen.”)
But they did not, even so, safeguard the water-supply system. Things didn’t go better with it, but worse! So slyly had that gang of engineers contrived to carry out an evil scheme. Even more: overcoming his intellectual’s interim nature, as a result of which he had never in his life expressed himself sharply, Oldenborger made so bold as to describe as stupid stubbornness the actions of the new chief of the water-supply system, Zenyuk (to Krylenko, “a profoundly likable person on the basis of his internal structure”).
It was at this point that it became clear that “engineer Oldenborger was consciously betraying the interests of the workers and that he was a direct and open enemy of the dictatorship of the working class.” They started bringing inspection commissions into the water-supply system, but the commissions found that everything was in good order and that water was being supplied on a normal basis. The RKI men, the “rabkrinovtsy,” refused to be satisfied with this. They kept pouring report after report into the RKI. Oldenborger simply wanted to “ruin, spoil, break down the water-supply system for political purposes,” but he was unable to. Well, they put what obstacles in his way that they could; they prevented wasteful boiler repairs and replacing the wooden tanks with concrete ones. At meetings of the water-supply-system workers, the leaders began saying openly that their chief engineer was the “soul of organized technical sabotage” and that he should not be believed, that he should be resisted at every point.
Despite all this, the operation of the water-supply system not only didn’t improve, but deteriorated.
What was particularly offensive to the “hereditary proletarian psychology” of the officials of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection and of the trade unions was that the majority of the workers at the pumping stations “had been infected with petty-bourgeois psychology” and, unable to recognize Oldenborger’s sabotage, had come to his defense. At this point, elections to the Moscow Soviet were being held and the workers nominated Oldenborger as the candidate of the water-supply system, against whom, of course, the Party cell backed its own Party candidate. However, this turned out to be futile because of the chief engineer’s fraudulent authority with the workers. Nonetheless, the Party cell brought up the question with the District Party Committee, on all levels, and announced at a general meeting that “Oldenborger is the center and soul of sabotage, and will be our political enemy in the Moscow Soviet!” The workers responded with an uproar and shouts of “Untrue! Lies!” And at that point the secretary of the Party Committee, Comrade Sedelnikov, flung right in the faces of the thousand-headed proletariat there: “I am not even going to talk to such Black Hundred, reactionary pogrom-makers.” That is to say: We’ll talk to you somewhere else.
Party measures were also taken: they expelled the chief engineer from — no less — the collegium for administration of the water system, and kept him under constant investigation; con- tinually summoned him before a multitude of commissions and subcommissions; kept interrogating him and giving him assignments that were to be urgently carried out. Every time he failed to appear, it was entered in the record “in case of a future trial.” And through the Council of Labor and Defense (Chair- man — Comrade Lenin) they got an “Extraordinary Troika” appointed to the water system. (It consisted of representatives of the RKI, the Council of Trade Unions, and Comrade Kuibyshev.)
And for the fourth year the water kept right on flowing through the pipes. And Moscovites kept on drinking it and didn’t notice anything wrong.
Then Comrade Sedelnikov wrote an article for the newspaper Ekonotnicheskaya Zhizn: “In view of the rumors disturbing the public in regard to the catastrophic state of the water mains …” and he reported many new and alarming rumors — even that the water system was pumping water underground and was intentionally washing away the foundations of all Moscow. ” (Set there by Ivan Kalita in the fourteenth century.) They summoned a Commission of the Moscow Soviet. The Commission found that the “state of the water system was satisfactory and that its technical direction was efficient.” Oldenborger denied all the accusations. And then Sedelnikov placidly declared: “I had set myself the task of stirring up a fuss about this matter in order to get the question of the spetsy taken up.”
What remained for the leaders of the workers to do at this point? What was the final, infallible method? A denunciation to the Cheka! Sedelnikov resorted to just that! He “painted a picture of the conscious wrecking of the water system by Oldenborger.” He did not have the slightest doubt that “a counterrevolutionary organization” existed “in the water system, in the heart of Red Moscow.” And, furthermore, a catastrophic situation at the Ruble vo water tower!
At this point, Oldenborger was guilty of a tactless act of rudeness, the outburst of a spineless, interim intellectual. They had refused to authorize his order for new boilers from abroad — and at the time, in Russia, it was quite impossible to fix the old ones. So Oldenborger committed suicide. (It had been just too much for one man — after all, he hadn’t undergone the conditioning for that sort of thing.)
The cause was not lost, however. They could find a counter-revolutionary organization without him. RKI men would now undertake to expose the whole thing. Some concealed maneuvering went on for two months. But such was the spirit at the beginning of the NEP that “a lesson had to be taught both one side and the other.” So there was a trial in the Supreme Tribunal.
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