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 enable the deaf to hear (537); However, Bliss discovered that in American history, people used telephone poles as means of execution to lynch African Americans. She provides a terrible list: a dead body was hung from a telephone pole (539), a black man was hung from a telephone pole (539), the bodies of men were lynched from telephone poles (541). But Bliss acknowledges that the Poles, of course, were not to blame (540). So, who is to blame for the race riots and the tragic deaths of African Americans? Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone? THE