Eula Bliss's article “Time and Distance Overcome” in The Iowa Review implies that the functions of the technological tool depend on the user: to be beneficial or harmful. Specifically, Bliss discusses the invention of the telephone, which was supposed to allow deaf people to hear (537); however, Bliss discovered that in American history people used telephone poles as execution tools to lynch African Americans. He gives a terrible list: the dead body was hung from a telephone pole (539), a black man was hanged from a telephone pole (539), the bodies of men lynched from telephone poles (541). But Bliss recognizes that, of course, the Poles are not to blame (540). So, who should be blamed for the race riots and tragic deaths of African Americans? Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of telephones? THE