> previous, related posts: New Canaan, Connecticut
Old Canaan When I grew up in the '60s and 70s, New Canaan was an IBM town. A large portion of my friends' dads worked for the mythic global giant, and its culture of intelligence, preppyness and Republican conformity pervaded the schools, shops, neighborhoods, clubs and houses of worship. It was at once the glue holding a town together and a binder of existential possibilities. Boys in IBM families were groomed from early on to be(come) faithful, law-abiding corporate managers and repeat their dads' way of life: the unflashy but expensive cars, big tree colonial houses with well-kept lawns and shrubs, paved driveways with basketball hoops, maybe a swimming pool—but probably not because all the clubs had pools, so why would anybody want one? New Canaan was social. Everybody knew each other. The culture of wealth and intelligence that IBM cultivated was blond, bland, and subtly oppressive—& concrete enough that when the Stepford Wives came out in '75, it was received as a stinging attack on all that was good and wholesome. I recall moms discussing it at the Lake Club, upset their suburban paradise was presented as "can you believe!" a horror movie. They were resentful, an unmommy-like trait. I was 13, antennae up, but it was over my head. I heard enough to understand IBM and my daddy-run world was being picked on by the movies. Curious. Why would anybody ever pick on New Canaan? I looked around me. What did it do wrong? Five years later, I was a high school senior going 60 on my way home from a girl I loved in a drag race with a lad who still lives in New Canaan, and the month old Chrysler Lebaron station wagon (simulated wood sides) slid off West Road and slammed into a massive stone pillar that, with its partner on the other side of the driveway, fronted IBM founder Thomas Watson's estate. 3 tons of rock and cast iron gate bounced over like a bowling pin. Nobody wore seatbelts back then and it's a miracle I survived, emerging from the wreck with a bruise on my arm. The lad I raced with (a deacon now at St. Mark's ) pulled over, backed up, rolled down the window, stuck his head out, swore, said good luck, gotta get outta here! Was gone. I understood. What he could do. Didn't want to be linked, associated, in trouble. And wouldn't be mentioned in any official version of what happened. Here's a googlemap pic. Looks like the pillars have been moved back from road and are smaller these days. What I remember hitting was near the tree on the left.
For twenty minutes I walked around the mess I made—the hissing deliquescing engine block shoved through the dashboard—imagining the future I'd destroyed. A life can end even before it begins: spiritual dread in its all Calvinist glory cloaked and choked until the police arrived. When he looked at my license, the officer in charge said to his partner, this is Cliff Heidinger's boy; call him. His partner said, but will you look at that! How did he survive?
To my surprise, I wasn't handcuffed; they didn't write a ticket or interview me. When my dad showed up, he rushed over and asked if I was ok. Tears ran from his eyes. I was prepared to be hollered at, condemned to hell for eternity, for I was regularly scorched for doing things of less consequence. My heart melted when I realized he was actually concerned I'd been hurt. That unmovable rock of dad loved me. He told me to get into his car, a fire engine red Cordoba (corinthian leather), and I watched him huddle with the officers. It wasn't a tense situation. They chatted, nodded, agreed. He came back, turned the key and we went home, leaving the steaming wreck and fallen pillar behind.
I never got a ticket, and the crash wasn't reported in the New Canaan Advertiser—because if it was, everybody in town would have known. My dad had an understanding with the police, based on a level of trust I never predicted, that kept my accident a secret. For him, and every other parent in New Canaan, the worse punishment imaginable was to have a story of human failure enter the rounds of tennis court gossip. In New Canaan, this politely savage form of public condemnation pervaded all dealings and lasted decades. I was untouched by calumny (what is gossip good for if it doesn't sizzle a story into bacony slander)—tho' I did have to get my own driving insurance which was very expensive, and had to pay for the stone pillar to be re-erected. But this was all hush hush. The term "privileged" was not in use then, but I knew I was just that. In some ironic/miraculous way, the conformist culture kept me from being punished; for my accident and crime (60 in a 20 zone) would have been big news, and thanks to my dad it never was. In IBM New Canaan, he could never allow that. And so mine was an accident that never happened.
> OK, so decades went by and lo and behold we learned that Dehomag, IBM's German subsidiary produced the punchcard computer, and it was owned by Willy Heidinger.
These IBM computers provided Nazis with the database they used to organize and execute the Holocaust. In fact, there might not have been a Holocaust, a highly efficient industrial "factory farm" genocide, without them. From IBM and The Holocaust, by Edwin Black (2012):
When Germany wanted to identify the Jews by name, IBM showed them how. When
Germany wanted to use that information to launch programs of social expulsion
and expropriation, IBM provided the technologic wherewithal. When the trains
needed to run on time, from city to city or between concentration camps, IBM
offered that solution as well. Ultimately, there was no solution IBM would not
devise for a Reich willing to pay for services rendered. One solution led to
another. No solution was out of the question.
As the clock ticked, as the punch cards clicked, as Jews in Germany saw
their existence vaporizing, others saw their corporate fortunes rise. Even as
German Jewry hid in their homes and wept in despair, even as the world
quietly trembled in fear, there was singing. Exhilarated, mesmerized, the
faithful would sing, and sing loudly to their Leaders—on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Some uniforms were brown. Some were blue.
> Yes. That giant estate I crashed into with such violence. So distant from, yet umbilically plugged into, the greatest horror of the 20th century.
I wonder how my innocent incubation in the next station to heaven occurred in the rippleless safe harbor of a company and a culture that treated the whole world as Canaan, a place that needs only to be cleared of its undesirables for paradise to appear.
I wonder about the New Canaan that hatched Proud Boy Ann Coulter, and how we ended up the way we did, living in an America that never stopped fighting WW2, and by so doing—by constantly using military force to achieve economic goals—coagulated into a white supremacist national socialist empire (MAGA) that as it collapses commits planetary biocide and drives humanity to collective suicide.
Willy Heidinger and the six degrees of separation. I wonder about that.
I wonder ...
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