Author: Todd Tucker

Today begins the real beginning of the blog. I needed a bit of extra time to wrap up the old job, meet a few deadlines, and make the move between DC and Cambridge.

I am now here, and settled. (Look, see the settled looking photo on a bucolic street!)
Posts forthcoming.

Today, a man who had a profound formative impact on my life passed. His name was Jason Noble, and he was a Louisville-based musician in the era-defining bands Rodan, Rachels, and Shipping News.

After the early years of alternative rock but before the Pitchfork era, there were a number of U.S. cities – including Louisville, Washington, D.C., and Olympia, Washington – where vast numbers of young musicians took the best of DIY punk energy and turned it towards more thoughtful meditations on power, love, and the darker sides of life. Much more so than in the music world of today, there were strong city-specific identities in these scenes.

Jason was a leading light of this world, and I was fortunate enough to have seen various of his bands play in Louisville, D.C. and in England. Although I was never at the center of these (often turfy) scenes, Jason was always super-kind. I remember spending half an hour with him at All Tomorrows Parties in the UK in April 2002 catching Cheap Trick and Zeni Geva. He also was a super thoughtful neighbor to my parents.

Jeffrey Lee Puckett of the Louisville Courier-Journal has Jason’s obituary. He will be missed.

What do we mean by “ceiling”?

The word is defined as:

1 the upper interior surface of a room or other similar compartment
2 an upper limit set on prices, wages, or expenditure
3 the maximum altitude that a particular aircraft can reach, or
4 Nautical the inside planking of a ship’s bottom and sides

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word comes from the 14th century Middle English word “celynge,” which referred to the act of “paneling, any interior surface of a building.” It borrows from the 12th century Middle French verb “celer”, which means “to conceal, cover with paneling.”

The word was probably influenced by the Latin “cælum”, meaning heaven or sky, but celer can be directly traced to the Latin “celare” (to hide, conceal), which is related to the word cell.

The word “cell” meant “small room, store room, or hut.” The word has counterparts in the Old Irish “cuile” (cellar), the Gothic “hulistr” (covering), and the Old English “heolstor” (lurking-hole, cave, covering). According to the Dictionary:

Earliest sense [of “cell”] is for monastic rooms, then prison rooms (1722). Used in 14c., figuratively, of brain “compartments;” used in biology 17c. of various cavities, but not in modern sense of “basic structure of living organisms” until 1845. Meaning “small group of people working within a larger organization” is from 1925. Cell body is from 1878; cell division from 1882; cell membrane from 1870 (but cellular membrane is 1773); cell wall from c.1848.

In political circles, when we talk about “ceilings,” we typically mean “upper limit,” like an upper limit on change. Indeed, one might read that connotation into my first post.

But when I describe the systems of domestic and international governance as a “ceiling,” I actually mean something much broader. Ceilings as roofs can serve a useful function of protecting from the elements. Ceiling as a verb draws attention to the actions of a maker or makers. Ceilings as heavens remind us of our aspirations. Ceilings as coverings can obscure the true nature of the room or state we are in. Ceilings as cells can be places of enslavement or enlightenment.

Systems of governance can be any of these things. For instance, systems of old age insurance and paid time off can enrich our lives and help us reach our potential. But systems of current campaign finance law obscure the fundamentally corrupt nature of modern politics.

I’ll take a broad view of the ceilings that I discuss in this blog. We can only ascertain if these ceilings are liberating or oppressive through examining their specific context.

This is a blog about life under two ceilings.

Many of us have aspirations to better the conditions of our family and community. Some of us don’t.

But all of us live under a new reality: there are ceilings over us defining the limits of the possible.

The first ceiling is familiar: our government. Its legislatures, police forces and courts set and enforce the rules that shape many aspects of our everyday existence.

The second ceiling is less so. Because our governments did not trust themselves to set the right shapes (or perhaps simply out of cynicism), they’ve begun creating another level of governance at the global level. It is a patchy system of bureaucracies and court-like structures with obscure acronym names like WTO or ICSID. Its architects belong to our nations, but also operate above them. Many profit from their work building the second ceiling and connecting it to the first. Some participate out of a belief that the second ceiling is necessary or useful.

Many of us do not perceive what relationship (if any) this second ceiling has to our day-to-day lives. But, over time, our aspirations may bump up against one or both ceilings in surprising ways. This blog is about those new realities.

A bit about me: I am from Louisville, Kentucky, but have spent most of my adult life in Washington, DC. I worked for the last ten years at two DC non-profits: Public Citizen (almost 8 years) and Center for Economic and Policy Research (for 2). I was the editor from 2006 through mid-July 2012 of the Eyes on Trade blog at Public Citizen, where I wrote about the legal, political and economic consequences of trade agreements. This year, I am moving to Cambridge, UK, where I will be writing on a dissertation on similar themes from a social science perspective.

I hope you enjoy this blog and join the conversation!