Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (13 page)

Meanwhile, on other sands, thousands of miles away along the Arabian Sea in the Indian state of Gujarat, 35,000 men from remote villages were earning as little as $1.50 a day for breaking up the world’s rusty, unwanted ships, riddled
with asbestos and toxic chemicals. The men wore only plastic sandals on their feet. In New York harbor, Brazilian merchant seamen embark on the North Atlantic wearing shorts and sandals. In Calcutta, children make flip-flops with scissors nearly the length of their arms. In Jakarta, Indonesia, shacks are built over a surface of old rubber sandals retrieved from refuse piles. And in formerly prosperous
developing countries, the plastic sandal is a harbinger of the return of bad times; in Iraq in 1998, a former computer science student was selling them in a marketplace.
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The zori’s universality has a double meaning. To billions of people it is
a foothold on an arduous climb to sharing the prosperity of the developed nations. But it is an insecure foothold, and where parasites or other natural
hazards are not serious issues, it may not be an improvement over the pleasure of walking the earth on broad, bare feet. But it is too late to return. The pioneer surfer Allan Seymour put it aptly: “We called them go-aheads, because you can’t walk backward in them.”
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I
F THE FLIP-FLOP SANDAL
is the revival of a primeval classic with new materials, the athletic shoe is a rare innovation in costume. Richard Wharton, a London retail shoe executive and sneaker connoisseur, has called sports shoes “the first new kind of footwear in the past three hundred years.” The novelty is as much in attitude as in construction.
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For most purchasers, the athletic shoe is yet another example of what could be called potential consumption. Home fireplaces and apartment balconies are seldom used, yet convey warmth or fresh air by inspiring fantasies of actually lighting a fire or sitting outside. Few owners of swimming pools actually do laps or even spend more than occasional minutes in the water; the possibility of plunging in
is what cools them. Likewise the hypothetical jog, or pickup basketball game, or distance walk invigorates the athletic-shoe wearer. Even boat shoes, disconcertingly grippy on urban pavement, are always ready to step aboard somebody else’s yacht. Unlike sandals, which usually constrain the gait, sport footwear with its stripes and swooshes holds out the possibility of speed without exertion.

The environmental educator David Orr has contrasted the “fast knowledge” of Promethean problem-solving Western societies with the “slow knowledge” of communities living together with other species in their habitats. The athletic shoe was born with the chemical transformation of the nineteenth century and may be the leading material sign of the enthusiasm for speed
that has marked the last 150 years so strongly. If the original
rice-straw zori stood for slow knowledge, the athletic shoe reflects and proclaims the glory of speed itself.
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Sandals and sneakers represent a contract between the two experiences of time. One form tends to limit speed, the other to promote it, a distinction apparent even on the streets. A federal police officer and sociologist
who has done fieldwork on the crack cocaine traffic in Honolulu reports that the runners—homeless men and women who shuttle between dealers’ safe houses and drug buyers—are usually able to recognize police by their black tennis shoes, worn even undercover “to be ready to fight, chase a suspect, make an arrest, etc.” The runners, lacking “tactical training,” wear the most comfortable local garb, sandals
or flip-flops. These observations suggest that the boundary between trained officer and low-level addicted criminal is more than just the gap between enforcement and transgression. It is the difference between two ways of moving, between fast time and slow time.
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As early as the 1960s, black prisoners in South Africa’s infamous Robben Island penitentiary were allowed only rubber sandals as footwear.
More recently, prison authorities worldwide have issued sandals, often flip-flops, not only to save money but to compel a slower, controllable style of movement. The bright orange or red jumpsuit and zori has become ubiquitous as the prescribed garb of the accused in televised arraignments. In court, sneaker-wearing convicts—especially wearing civilian-style clothes—can be an escape risk not
only because they can run faster, but because they can blend more easily into a crowd. Conversely, sandals can impede mobility even in warm climates; one South Carolina escapee was apprehended trying to buy a pair of shoes to replace them, while another fugitive in Arizona was caught by a discount store security guard after switching his sandals for a pair of Reeboks. And the growing complexity
of athletic shoes has become a security risk in itself. The American Correctional Association (ACA) security manual for prison administrators cautions that normally “tennis shoes from the community and shoes with air pockets or pumps should not be authorized, as they provide a particularly convenient hiding place for contraband.”
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On the street, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, one synonym
for sneakers was “felony shoes”: a means of escape for offenders more ambitious than Honolulu crack runners. Perpetrators like the same showy styles as other young people despite the added risk of identification. Police tracked and caught at least one convenience store robber by following the blinking lights built into the heels of his running shoes, earning him an
appearance on a new television
series,
America’s Dumbest Criminals
. Other officers identified a young bank robber by the unusual thick-soled shoes he was wearing when arrested on a minor traffic charge. America’s most proficient cat burglar of the 1990s, Blane David Nordahl, routinely discarded his shoes (as well as clothing and tools) after his sneaker print on a countertop led to arrest and a three-year jail sentence. The
FBI is able to identify 70 percent of the footwear impressions it receives, according to the former head of its footwear unit, William J. Bodziak.
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Sneakers are as suited for self-assertion as for flight. The bouncing and dragging “pimp walk” was a staple of black exploitation films of the 1960s and early 1970s, just before the sneaker explosion. In Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel
Bonfire of the Vanities
, youthful black defendants in the Bronx County Courthouse defy officialdom with the pimp walk’s successor, an insolent gait called the “pimp roll,” a “pumping swagger” that another writer, a London journalist, has described as “that swaying, strutting way you walk when your soles are bouncy and your ankles supported”—a gait less feasible in sandals than in running shoes.

As usual in conflicts,
the police have body techniques of their own. Many younger officers are bodybuilding fitness enthusiasts far from the old doughnut-munching stereotype, and athletic shoes fit their new image. One of Wolfe’s white protagonists, the assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, begins to wear sneakers on the subway hoping he will be mistaken for one of the plainclothes policemen who have adopted them
en masse. The Chicago Police Department recently converted from standard issue black oxfords to a leather shoe close in construction to running shoes.
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The athletic shoe embodies speed, dynamism, ambition, and the search for a technological advantage. Apart from relatively high-priced specialized sports models, such as the Teva brand developed by a whitewater-rafting enthusiast, the ordinary
flapping sandal, whether in flimsy plastic or luxurious materials, connotes voluntary or enforced idleness. The story of the sport shoe is as remarkable as that of sandals. And it, too, shows how new techniques of motion interact with new materials and processes to create endless variations on a classic theme.

The specialized running shoe is remarkably recent in Western
history. Even before shoes were made by machine, it would not have been difficult to use lasts and materials optimized for running. When Romanticism
brought an ethereal spirit to ballet in the early nineteenth century, shoemakers responded with the pointe shoe. The new dance style, made famous by the ballerina Maria Taglioni, was and remains one of the most demanding of all Western body techniques.
The shoe, with its reinforced toe box modified and conditioned by each dancer according to her personal formula, was not the hardware that made the style possible; the technique brought the new form of construction into being. (And technique is so important that most ballet dancers have so far rejected high-technology pointe shoes designed to protect toes and cushion impacts, partly because
the new models are stiffer and partly because dancers are so attached to their idiosyncratic customization rituals.) It took far longer for purpose-built athletic shoes to emerge. The reason for the delay lies not just in the limits of technology and materials but in attitudes toward running and toward shoes.
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Running may be the oldest sport of the West. It played an important part in ancient
Egyptian festivals. Egyptians recorded times for distance running that compare with those of the best nineteenth-century European athletes, and the Egyptians were almost certainly barefoot. In Greece, at the first Olympics in 776
B.C.
, races of from about 192 meters to 5,000 meters were run without shoes. Although Greek message carriers ran in soft leather boots called
endromides
, and although
the Greeks were aware of spiked shoes used in the icy Caucasus, they had no interest in footwear for athletics. The original Olympic starting line had grooves for runners’ toes, and in the absence of cleats even sprinters are pictured standing upright at the start rather than leaning forward on their hands. Bare feet were, of course, part of male athletic nudity, a custom that scandalized foreigners
but served the Greeks themselves as proof of their superiority to barbarians. Even “hoplite” foot races based on warfare, run with shields and at first with helmets, omitted sandals. (Women, who ran wearing light clothing at special events for them, at least sometimes wore sandals.) The Greeks applied their ingenuity to running terrain rather than foot coverings. They went to some expense to prepare
the track for bare feet. The soil was weeded and dug up before the events, and covered with fine sand. At Delphi the cost of the sand alone was considerable: over 83 staters, the equivalent of more than ten months’ wages for a laborer. Runners trained for this surface, practicing on deeper sand. Today’s experts recommend grass as the best running surface and warn that running on beaches endangers
the Achilles tendon, but in antiquity, a carefully prepared layer of sand
over dirt may have been the state of the art. Late in the Olympics, during Roman rule, Greek athletes did begin to wear a type of sandal called the
krepis
, probably owing either to the influence of Roman customs or to changing standards of track maintenance. By the time of Diocletian (
A.D.
245–313) there is a reference to
shoes called
gallica
used for running. But, having been born with the Romans, the athletic shoe appears to have vanished in the West with the end of the Olympics and the disappearance of Greco-Roman physical culture under Christianity.
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Unlike the ancient Greeks, who prized moderation too much to train for anything like the modern marathon or, indeed, any race longer than about three miles, many
New World peoples were superb distance runners. Running was not only part of a spiritual regime, as it was for the Greeks; it was often essential in hunting and for communication among dispersed settlements. Native Americans developed sophisticated shoe forms like the moccasin that continue to influence the footwear industry today, and some athletes and couriers wore sandals or moccasins. The
Tarahumaras of the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua, northern Mexico, were famous for a kickball race lasting up to sixty hours, run with sandals. Today their descendants still earn a living as corn farmers, their feet protected only by tire-tread sandals with leather thongs (huaraches), routinely covering ten miles or more a day at work or going to school in their harsh climate. In the 1990s they defeated
some of the strongest U.S. athletes in hundred-mile ultramarathons in the Southwest, on at least one occasion discarding the running shoes donated by footwear companies that had sponsored them. Complaining that their feet were sweating, they replaced the shoes with new huaraches they had fashioned soon after their arrival in the United States from dumped tires that by Mexican standards had ample
tread left. (Their U.S. supporters failed to find a tire company to replace the backing of the shoe manufacturers.) Moccasin-wearing Mohave couriers covered a hundred miles a day, at least in the times before the martial tribe’s defeat by U.S. troops in 1859. Many Native Americans were able to run scores of miles daily without any foot protection at all. The Hopi Louis Tewanima (1879–1935), a 1912
Olympic silver medalist, was said as a youth to have run 120 miles from his village to Winslow, Arizona, and back, barefoot, just to see the trains coming through. Photographs of Native American races from the early twentieth century suggest that bare feet were still the norm.
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Europeans and European Americans took a different course. As the very term
chivalry
implies, European combat arts were rooted in an equestrian society that left walking and running to laborers, servants, and common soldiers. There was no courtly counterpart to the armed footraces of the Greek Olympics. Real knights did not run. Competitive Western footracing reemerged in early modern England in the lowest domestic ranks. Footmen ran at the sides of coaches to protect them from obstacles
and raced to the inn at the next destination to procure lodgings. This strenuous pace required constant training, and a first-rate footman could cover sixty miles a day. In the early seventeenth century footmen began to race each other, but without the glory of Greek or Indian runners, despite the new term
celeripedians
. Servile most remained, although some artisans and even a few highborn young
men also took up running, and footmen’s employers bet on their servants’ matches. Footmen wore pumps, light shoes with thin soles and no fasteners, kept on the foot at the toe and heel—a style now best known in women’s dress shoes and men’s formal shoes, not as athletic gear. One of the early aristocratic runners, the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s eldest son, once competed in boots as a handicap
and won.
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