Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  Women know in their hearts that beauty products won’t make them beautiful.

  Men understand they’ll never look like Jim Palmer in Jockey shorts.

  We all know foreign countries don’t look as exotic as the travel ads picture them.

  If advertising has to be absolutely honest, does this mean that GRANDMA’S ORIGINAL HOMEMADE MOLASSES COOKIES would have to be made by Grandma at home?

  Can you imagine how ads would read in newspapers or sound on television if they had to tell all? The classifieds would be hard hit:

  JOB WANTED: INEXPERIENCED AND UNWILLING TO LEARN, LAZY HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT LOOKING FOR HIGH PAY FOR LITTLE WORK.

  The real estate ads would change:

  HOUSE FOR SALE: TWO DRAFTY BEDROOMS AND ONE YOU COULD PUT A COT IN. TWO HALF BATHROOMS. BASEMENT LEAKS, FURNACE ABOUT SHOT. ON WOODED LOT IF YOU CALL TWO TREES A WOODED LOT.

  The secondhand-car ads would say something like:

  FOR SALE: RUSTY 1981 PONTIAC. SEEN BETTER DAYS. $4,300 OR BEST OFFER OVER $2,000. LOADED WITH GADGETS YOU DON’T NEED. GETS 14 MPG DOWNHILL. FRONT SEAT UNCOMFORTABLE ON LONG DRIVES. MISSING CIGARETTE LIGHTER.

  Insurance-company ads wouldn’t emphasize how quickly they pay claims. They’d be more like this:

  DON’T LOOK FOR YOUR MONEY TOMORROW IF YOU’RE INSURED WITH US. IF WE PAID EVERY CLAIM EVER MADE, WE’D BE OUT OF BUSINESS.

  I don’t know how many cigarettes the tobacco companies would have sold if they’d had to tell all they knew all these years:

  IRRITATE YOUR FRIENDS AND YOUR THROAT, SHORTEN YOUR LIFE, ACQUIRE A FILTHY HABIT. SMOKE UNLUCKY STRIKE CIGARETTES. THEY’RE WORST FOR YOU!

  No Thief to Catch

  We’re afraid of thieves. We’re wary of the con artist trying to swindle us. We don’t dare put down a suitcase in an airport while we go to the bathroom. We lock our houses, our cars, our bicycles, our windows. We put our treasures in safe-deposit boxes instead of leaving them out in the open where we can enjoy them. If someone approaches us on the street at night, we’re nervous. It’s gotten so we take dishonesty for granted. We assume people are dishonest until they prove otherwise. That’s a sad state of affairs.

  There are 547,000 people in prisons and jails in the United States. That’s 1 person in every 500. You have to figure that for every criminal who’s caught, there are 5 who are not. Still, it leaves us with a nation of honest people. The average American would never consider stealing anything. Even better, the average American who found a purse or a wallet with cash and the owner’s name in it would seek out and return both with no thought of a reward.

  Think how nice life would be if everyone was honest:

  —We wouldn’t need locks on our doors.

  —If we didn’t have locks on our doors, we wouldn’t need to carry keys so we wouldn’t ever lose our keys or misplace them.

  —Windows wouldn’t have those little butterfly things on top to prevent them from being opened from outside. Ground-floor apartments in big cities wouldn’t need bars on their windows.

  —It wouldn’t be necessary to stand in line waiting while the clerk writes your driver’s license number and a credit-card number on the back of your check so they’ll know where to get you if the check bounces. People would never bounce checks and, if they did by mistake, they’d rush back to make them good.

  —Late-night walks on dark streets would become popular.

  —We’d only need a few lawyers, and I can’t think why we’d even need them. Our courtrooms would be empty because there’d be hardly any lawsuits.

  —When there was a trial, a jury could come to a decision quickly because they’d know they were getting the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  —Women could leave their pocketbooks anywhere.

  —No one would break a contract because a contract would just be a spoken agreement between two parties that neither would ever break because they’d given their word.

  —Arrangements for a house sale would be done with a handshake agreement.

  —We wouldn’t need police except to direct traffic and tell strangers in town how to get somewhere.

  —There wouldn’t be any guns. Why would anyone need a gun if there were no criminals?

  —We wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money inspecting Soviet missile sites because, if everyone in the whole world was honest, we could trust them when they told us how many they had. All our spies could come home and all their spies could go home.

  —If there were things we wanted to know about a foreign country, we’d ask them and they’d tell us.

  —We’d save money on the Federal Bureau of Investigation because they could go out of business for lack of any wrongdoing to investigate.

  The dishonest handful among us make life difficult and less happy for everyone. We ought to be angrier at them than we are.

  Making a Killing Killing

  When you read that we’re going to spend $9 billion on a wonderful new weapon capable of killing everyone but us, don’t worry. It probably won’t work.

  There’s no reason to have a lot of confidence in the people who design and make weapons. They’ve been wrong too often. They mean well. They want their weapons to kill people but usually the weapons don’t work. If all the weapons ever made worked perfectly, everyone on earth would have been dead years ago. Weapons makers are more successful making money than war.

  Every new weapon seems like the ultimate one but usually turns out to have something wrong with it. Our newest Star Wars weapon idea is some kind of laser beam to be aimed at an enemy from a satellite. The trouble with a lot of these highly technical weapons is, wars end up being fought in the mud and the weapons don’t work in the mud. It’s impossible for someone sitting at a desk in an office to know what a soldier will need in the mud. The writer has been in the mud.

  One of the problems with a new weapon is that you can’t really test it until there’s a war. Then, if it doesn’t work, it’s too late. In training sessions, our army and navy practice with new weapons but it isn’t the same. “Maneuvers,” as they call these practice wars, are only some officer’s guess what might happen. The officers doing the teaching have usually not been at war themselves. They’re teaching what they’ve been taught. Most maneuvers are expensive jokes. If we’d fought our wars the way we maneuvered, we’d have lost. The writer has been on maneuvers, too.

  The Defense Department says that Iranian airliner with 290 people on board was shot down in 1988 because of human error by navy men, not because there was anything wrong with the complicated tracking systems being used. Well, if the people charged with operating the equipment can’t work it, there’s something wrong with the equipment.

  During World War II, half the weapons given American soldiers to fight with were poorly designed or wrong for the job. Things haven’t changed just because weapons are more complicated.

  The Norden bombsight was going to revolutionize the air war over Germany by making “pinpoint” bombing possible. They always used the word “pinpoint.” The bombsight must have worked perfectly in theory but bombardiers either couldn’t master it or were too busy being shot at to fool with it. They got near the target, pressed the bombs-away button and hoped for the best.

  Everyone thought the B-24 bomber was going to be an improvement over the B-17. It was faster, carried more bombs and was more maneuverable. For a variety of reasons that wouldn’t show up in peacetime testing, it never matched the B-17. No B-24 pilot agrees.

  When the army came up with a nifty little rifle called the carbine, it looked like the answer to a soldier’s prayer. It was a small handy weapon that was infinitely easier to carry and store than the seven-pound M1. For a short time, every infantryman tried to get his hands on a carbine. The carbines were cute, they felt good and they were light.

  It didn’t take soldiers long to find out that the difference between the carbine and the M1 was the difference between a water pistol and a real weapon. They abandoned the carbine and
went back to their M1’s.

  We developed a new tank for the invasion of France and it was hopelessly wrong for the job. Tanks usually are. The Jeep was more successful helping to win World War II than the M1 tank.

  We’ve spent billions developing the new stealth bomber that’s supposed to be able to fly into enemy airspace undetected. We’ll see. The British built a two-engine bomber made of wood called the Mosquito forty-five years ago for a lot less money. It went undetected by German radar.

  What the Pentagon needs from weapons makers is a money-back guarantee. Too many companies have made too much money over the years producing weapons that don’t work.

  Learning to Weed

  Considering how poorly so many things are made and how sloppily so much work is done, it’s surprising how many people still recognize excellence when they see it. The fact that there are still people who prize excellence is a good sign. Maybe there’s still hope.

  Excellence is rare. It calls attention to itself wherever it exists. Last weekend we stopped by the best little vegetable stand I know of. The woman who runs it said they would be closing next weekend. It’s always a sad day but it’s an inevitable one because she sells only the things they grow, and their growing season is over. She doesn’t bring in avocados from California, oranges from Florida or melons from Colorado to stay in business.

  In June, she begins to get raspberries and asparagus. By July she has beans, peas, green and yellow squash, potatoes and cauliflower. In August the corn, tomatoes and melons come. Hers are the best. The little parking area in front of her stand is jammed with randomly parked cars. People drive ten or twelve miles, passing six or eight supermarkets on the way, just to get her fresh vegetables.

  The thing that worries me most is that while she may have a hundred or more customers a day, the supermarkets, with vegetables picked a week before and shipped in from faraway places, have thousands.

  Excellence attracts a crowd but there’s so little of it that it’s always a sellout.

  The best doctors can’t take any more patients. You can’t afford the best lawyers and, even if you could they’re too busy to take your case.

  There are always one or two builders in town who do excellent work. They’re booked.

  This summer we got hold of a fine builder and he put a nice little addition on our house out behind the kitchen. When he finished, he got the best painter to do the inside and outside of the addition. Painting is one of those jobs that seems easy enough for anyone to do. All I have to do to see the difference between a do-it-yourself job and a good professional one is to compare a job I’ve done with his.

  We were so pleased with the paint job that we talked with the painter about doing one of the upstairs bedrooms.

  “You better make up your mind quick if you want me,” he said. “I’m already booked through April.”

  That’s the way it is with excellence. You’d think there’d be more of it if so many people want it.

  The things I’ve owned that were made according to high standards of excellence stand out in my mind. Just offhand I can think of a watch, two kitchen knives, a car, several tools, a camera and an overcoat, all of which have been a great pleasure to own because of their excellence.

  You can spot excellence a mile away. If you go into a strange restaurant, you can tell within ten seconds whether the food’s going to be any good. You can tell almost everything about a restaurant before you even sit down. There are hundreds of signs that suggest excellence or, more often, mediocrity.

  Too many Americans are settling for mediocrity. Too many are buying the cheapest of everything without regard to its quality. If they can buy it for less, they take it. At the supermarket it’s the lowest-quality merchandise that sells the fastest. Junk-building-material stores that sell the poorest-grade paint, plywood and tools are proliferating. “Outlet” stores with cheap goods are pushing the quality department stores out of business.

  All of us ought to be putting the pressure on manufacturers to make things better, not encouraging them to continue making them cheaper. We ought to be letting them know they can’t pass off their junk on us.

  Maybe our schools should teach courses in the appreciation of excellence. Too many people today aren’t bothering to drive the ten miles to the vegetable stand.

  TRUTHS

  Spring in the City

  All the poems and the songs about spring make it sound as if it only happens in the country. Spring may be a happier occasion some places than others but it happens everywhere equally. Spring is just as spring in the city as in the country.

  It is considered normal for all of us to speak positively about the country and negatively about the city. It doesn’t matter what city. Country life is known to be innocent, serene and wholesome; city life is artificial, evil and filled with misery and corruption.

  While I have no intention of breaking with this tradition, I would like to point out that spring is just as noticeable to a city person in the city as it is to a farmer in the country. Furthermore, I suspect that while spring is as noticeable to a city person in the country as it is to the farmer, spring in the city might go unnoticed by the farmer.

  It’s interesting that even though all the talk is about how wonderful the country is, most people choose to live in the cities. This could be attributed to better chances of making a living in a crowd, but something happened this morning that made me wonder about that.

  I was sitting at my desk, staring idly out a window in my office, when a bird of undetermined species came and sat on the sill. All I can say for sure is it was neither a robin nor a pigeon. I don’t know whether the bird had been south for the winter or not but he must have come from somewhere because it’s the first I’ve seen him … or perhaps her.

  I looked at the bird for a while and then watched it soar away. “This bird,” I thought to myself, “is free as a bird. He could go anywhere he wants but he chooses to be here in the city with all the evil, corruption and misery. Why?”

  Why does any bird choose to land on my cement windowsill when he could just as easily go to the country and live under the eaves of a barn?

  The bird suggests to me that living in the country is not always all it’s cracked up to be. Farmers may be leaving the farm in droves because they borrowed a million dollars from the bank and can’t pay back the loans, but birds don’t come to New York because they’re head over tails in debt. They come because they want to live here. It gives me some hope that I’m not crazy for wanting to live here myself.

  Spring has sprung in New York City. Signs of it are everywhere. It is light now at 6 A.M. and the rumble of the garbage trucks begins earlier. The loud sounds of honking horns being blown by irritated drivers of cars trapped behind the garbage trucks on narrow streets can be heard all across the city an hour earlier too.

  The sirens and flashing lights of the police cars going for coffee are just a little brighter, just a little louder and moving just a little faster because it’s spring.

  And don’t tell me about the little shoots from the spring plantings that are beginning to push their little heads up through the soil on the farms of America. What do you think that green stuff is emerging from the dirt that has become trapped between the divisions of the cement sidewalks? We may call them weeds in the city but they are clearly related to the growing things the farmers are borrowing millions to encourage in their fields.

  The homeless emerge from the city shelters at this time of year and sleep, once again, on the sidewalks, warmed only by the hot air coming up through the grates covering the basement power centers of the tall buildings.

  The street peddlers emerge and spread their wares in everyone’s way on the sidewalks; tens of thousands of city buses that crisscross Manhattan, which for months have been too cold, suddenly become too hot.

  Don’t tell a city person that spring is a country phenomenon.

  The Right Stuff on College Campuses

  College students are protesting th
e fact that their college administrators have invested some of their money in companies that do business with South Africa. College students are always protesting something and the rest of us don’t pay much attention to them.

  Most of us are busy with our personal things, like making a living or keeping our family in one piece, so we leave the world problems to government officials in Washington and the college students. Sometimes, though, an important issue is brought to our attention so forcefully that we can’t avoid thinking about it.

  South Africa is a good example. I hope South African student protesters, both black and white, who were beaten recently with clubs and metal-tipped whips, know how much the beating they took did for their cause. Millions of Americans, who are normally disinterested, watched, and if they had been disinterested before, they no longer were after watching the storm-troop behavior of the South African police.

  For several months, reporters have been barred from covering police activity in putting down the rebellions in the black townships in South Africa. We haven’t heard anything but the statistics on how many protesters police killed, because the government won’t allow reporters to go watch. Reporters and television cameras were there during this recent horror story because the action took place in the central part of Johannesburg. It made the rest of us more aware of why our college students are protesting the situation in South Africa, just as the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl made us sensitive to the cause of the nuclear protesters.

  The students’ protests at some of our best colleges put college businessmen in a difficult position. A lot of them don’t like South African government policies any better than the protesting students do, but they’re more practical about it. They invest the money to produce the most it can for their colleges without regard for how those companies conduct their business. Some college administrators have no sympathy for demonstrating students because those students often accept scholarship aid from the same college endowment funds whose investment policies they are protesting.