{"id":4120,"date":"2014-04-06T20:46:48","date_gmt":"2014-04-07T01:46:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4120"},"modified":"2014-04-14T20:57:34","modified_gmt":"2014-04-15T01:57:34","slug":"the-caboose-end-of-the-train-but-not-yet-of-the-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4120","title":{"rendered":"The Caboose: End of the Train, But Not (Yet) of the Word"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was an interesting comment on the Bloomberg web site this past week in an article<\/a> about the US Supreme Court’s decision allowing rich political donors to give campaign contributions to as many incumbent or wannabe Congressional representatives and senators as they want, despite previous restrictions under the Federal Election Campaign Law of 1971. The previous cap on how much can be given to any one candidate remains ($2,600 per candidate); but the campaign contribution law also had a provision limiting the total amount that any person can give to all federal-level candidates in a year to $123,200. The decision in this case (McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, brought against the government by an Alabama businessman and GOP official), \u201cdeal[s] a fresh blow to efforts to curb the role of money in American politics\u201d according to Bloomberg. The Court vote was a close one, though, at 5 to 4. <\/p>\n

As to the interesting comment in the article: Dirk Van Dongen<\/a>, president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributers and a longtime Republican fundraiser, felt that the Court’s decision was good because it strengthens the political parties. Well, that isn’t very surprising given that Mr. Van Dongen is a Republican and stands to benefit from the decision. But Mr. Van Dongen also said that \u201c[c]ampaign-finance reforms and Citizens United have weakened the party committees such that they are often the caboose of contribution-consideration sequencing,\u201d <\/p>\n

Again, the meaning of Mr. Van Dongen’s words aren’t all that interesting \u2013 i.e. that the national Republican and Democratic parties had previously lost power and influence because of the individual donation limits and the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Citizens United case, which together encourage corporations and rich people to spend a lot on single-issues committees (such as pro or anti-Obamacare committees) to endorse a particular candidate (they can do so without spending limits). Well, actually this is interesting if you are concerned about good government and the proper workings of democracy here in the USA. For those of us who are concerned that America is increasingly run by a rich minority with diminishing input from the \u201c99%\u201d, the Supreme Court majority and Mr. Van Dongen are rather ominous. But for now, let’s take a look at the analogy that Mr. Van Dongen used to make his point. <\/p>\n

Mr. Van Dongen talks about a \u201ccaboose\u201d \u2013 literally, something that railroads once used at the end of their freight trains where train crew members could keep an eye on the train and hopefully stop a following train from crashing into theirs if they had to make an unexpected stop. Since the mid-1980s, the railroads convinced the federal and state governments that cabooses and the crew members that rode on them (the \u201cflagmen\u201d) were no longer needed due to automated signalling systems, radio communication devices, GPS tracking, and other rules and procedures meant to avoid rear-end collisions. Although a few caboose cars are still used in limited circumstances, for the most part the caboose has been gone from the railroad scene for at more than 20 years now.<\/p>\n

So it’s interesting that a political official would assume in 2014 that the public would understand what he means when he refers to a caboose. Old timers like myself (and Mr. Donegan, who is around 70) certainly know, but most of the upcoming Millennial generation probably never saw a train with a caboose. (Is this perhaps just another example of how the Republican Party is still out of touch with today’s youth, despite its desire to reach out<\/a> to them?). <\/p>\n

Let’s leave politics behind for a second and talk about the caboose. I believe that this is one of those words that the public got to like, partly because of the way that it sounds. And yes, anyone older than 45 or 50 probably has childhood memories of waving to the man in the caboose at the end of a passing train. In fact, there was a popular child’s story book called \u201cThe Little Red Caboose<\/a>\u201d. This book was first published in 1953, the year when I was born \u2013 and I still have the copy of LRC that my parents gave me when I was a child. What surprises me is that the book is still in print, and people are still buying it for their children and reviewing it on Amazon<\/a>!! <\/p>\n

For whatever reason, despite its technological obsolescence, the caboose has not yet been forgotten in popular memory. Perhaps this classic children’s book is a big part of the reason for this! Railroads themselves often used other names for cabooses (back when they were in use). Some railroads officially called them \u201ccabin cars\u201d, some termed them \u201cway cars\u201d, and the Canadian railroads said that they were \u201cvans\u201d. Railroad men themselves often used slang terms such as \u201ccrummy\u201d or \u201chack\u201d when referring to where they rode at the end of a freight train. <\/p>\n

Interestingly, the word \u201ccaboose\u201d originated as something of a slang term itself, stemming from the earliest days of railroading in the middle of the 19th Century. Once the early railroads got long enough and busy enough to worry about trains rear-ending each other (well before automatic signal systems came, perhaps 40 years later), they realized that it was best to station a man at the end of each train, and give him a flag so as to get the attention of another train coming up from behind. They probably at first just called this a crew car or such. <\/p>\n

But after a while, as railroads became the hot growth industry of the 1800s, some former sailors got jobs working the trains. And the rear crew cars (looking at first like a box with windows and seats placed on a flatbed car) reminded them of the food-cooking cabins on the old sailing ships (and not inappropriately; railroad guys learned to use these rear-end cars to cook their own food during the long, slow trips that most early trains made through remote regions). Back before ships were routinely made of steel, when cooking stoves had to use wood or coal (which made a lot of smoke), food preparations had to be done up on the top deck of a ship, as to avoid fires and asphyxiation. Interestingly, in France and Belgium<\/a>, the sailors had a nick-name for these top-deck cooking cabins: the French called them a \u201ccamboose\u201d and the Dutch a \u201ckabhuis\u201d, both possibly a corruption from a German term meaning \u201ccabin house\u201d. <\/p>\n

The former sailors now working on the trains had been familiar with European colleagues (being a sailor was always a good way to see the world and meet people from distant lands), and soon adapted and Americanized the informal term that they heard used in foreign ports to refer to ship galleys. And somehow the term stuck on the railroads; again, partly because of the interesting sounds behind this word (in my opinion). It was a word that was easy to remember and easy to say.<\/p>\n

And it turns out, the caboose is now hard to forget, despite the fact that the railroads don’t have them anymore. But then again, according to Mr. Van Dongen’s logic, the Supreme Court itself has retired the metaphorical \u201ccaboose\u201d that housed the national political parties in the era of issue committees. In the future, the GOP will not be at the tail end of the money-and-power train in our political system. So, good words like \u201ccaboose\u201d can keep on rolling for a while despite what goes on in the world, but eventually they will reach the end of the line. Still, it is interesting to note that social memories and attitudes don’t turn on a dime (both for better and for worse), even in the age of instant communications, 24\/7 news cycles, information on almost anything at the touch of a keyboard, and 2-minute attention spans. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was an interesting comment on the Bloomberg web site this past week in an article about the US Supreme Court’s decision allowing rich political donors to give campaign contributions to as many incumbent or wannabe Congressional representatives and senators as they want, despite previous restrictions under the Federal Election Campaign Law of 1971. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4120"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4124,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120\/revisions\/4124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}