RAND PAUL IS RIGHT!

Jerry Harkins

Well, you knew that.  Rand Paul is three goosesteps to the right of Vlad the Impaler but what I really mean is that he is actually correct on at least one issue.  “I’ve been waiting,” he said recently, “for twenty years to talk about how bad these toilets are.”  He was referring to those damn low-flush toilets mandated by water conservation extremists.  You know:  the kind you have to flush three or four times which wind up using two or three times as much water as the old ones.  The next step is to return to the middle ages when you threw the contents of your slop jars out the window.  Of course living in the post-modern era means your slop jars will at least be disposable like everything else.  You will merely throw the whole thing out the window.  Not sanitary maybe but it will save a hell of a lot of water.

There’s a lot of this going around and we will be looking to Senator Paul for leadership in exposing it all.  Just for openers, we once had a perfectly good system for communicating with other people.  It was called the telephone and it instantly solved the problems of illiteracy and terrible spelling (you didn’t have to be able to read and write) not to mention awful handwriting.  Moreover, it was sort of friendly in the sense that at least some subscribers could learn to ignore the ring that peremptorily summoned most people to instant attendance.  (There was a reason Pavlov used a telephone bell to condition his dogs.  And a reason the telephone company called itself the Bell System.)  Anyway, it was the first salvo of the Information Revolution and it worked pretty well for a hundred years.  They kept adding annoying “features” to what they called “POTS”—plain old telephone service.  Call waiting, call forwarding, call answering, call messaging, caller ID, conference calling and other gizmos meant to make it impossible to escape from Ma Bell’s clutches.  Then some anarchist invented the cell phone. 

There’s a lot wrong with cell phones.  The audio quality is abysmal.  Among other things, it encourages people to shout thereby exposing the rest of us to their boring or salacious personal lives.  They are the leading cause of distracted driving, bullying and mindless babbling.  As it turns out, cell phones are the principal technology being used to convert the entire world into a more sophisticated version of George Orwell’s Oceania.  Big Brother would have loved cell phones.  As a society, we are not better off because we can read Prince Charles’ erotic fantasies about Camilla in the afternoon papers.  Somehow Charlie didn’t get the memo from the palace IT Department to the effect that cell phones are a truly public utility.  Or maybe he got it but never mastered the art of reading.

Email is a lot worse.  So-called snail mail was sacrosanct.  If it was sealed and had a stamp on it, the only person who could legally open it in the absence of a court order was the recipient.  Moreover, it was automatically copyrighted in the name of the writer.  Mail was delivered twice a day which is enough.  (When the Post Office went to once a day, it was actually an improvement.)  In some places, you could mail a shopping list to the grocery store in the morning and your food would be delivered the same afternoon.  You could send a letter from New York to Los Angeles special delivery for twenty cents.  It would get there the next day.  Email on the other hand is almost as private as smoke signals.  The reason so many financial executives are in jail today is that they blithely went about plotting the downfall of the global economy on Gmail.  On top of that, email has destroyed the Postal Service whose “service” has devolved to the levels of the Pony Express.

Nor is email the worst of it.  We have managed to dumb language down even further through such innovations as Facebook, Twitter and something called “texting.”  Under the mantle of Equal Rights for Illiterates, we have made it possible for our least gifted citizens to let the world know the most picayune details of their impoverished lives in real time, 24/7.  In the era of multitasking, we “text” while driving and while crossing busy intersections on foot.  We check Facebook in the bathtub and in church.  Marshall McLuhan said that media are an extension of our senses.  They used to be but now they have pretty much replaced our senses.  We no longer look.  We take a digital photo.  We no longer go.  We download.  We no longer think.  We blurb.  In 140 character bursts including spaces and emoticons.  Lol!

Once upon a time we had plenty of Big Problems to occupy the attention of our best scientific minds.  We needed stuff like DDT, thalidomide, napalm, tail fins and atomic bombs.  But with one thing and another, we ran out of Big Problems and had to dream up new ones if we wanted to keep our lockhold on Nobel Prizes.  It wasn’t easy and some things did not make the cut.  For example, we invented a supersonic passenger plane to address the critical need to save celebrities two hours flying time between New York and California.  We knew this would annoy everybody in Olathe, Kansas with the sonic booms disturbing their sex lives (this was before Governor Brownback outlawed sex in Kansas) not to mention the digestion of their cows which seemed a small price to pay.  But it turned out that nobody learned to love the booms and we had to restrict the SST’s to mid-ocean flight paths.  So after three hours you wound up at Heathrow or De Gaulle or JFK where it took three more hours to find your luggage and clear customs.

Mindless Progress has now been enshrined as the national psychosis in Silicon Valley which is located at the last stop of the Great Frontier, otherwise known as the Place Where the Sun Sets.  The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit has been replaced by the Geek in the Unwashed Hoodie.  The only hope is that Google robots will soon take over everything.