Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Page 4

  —Designer telephones in bright colors and strange shapes. Telephones don’t seem to work noticeably better since they stopped making them all black and white and one style.

  —Elevator music. It suggests all of us have to be entertained, amused or diverted from our own thoughts every minute of the day no matter what we’re doing.

  —Push-button controls on car radios. Turning two dials, one to find the station and a second to control the volume, was all we ever needed.

  —Newspapers printed in color. A headline is a way of getting us to read a story by telling us, briefly, what it’s about in an interesting way. It shouldn’t be necessary to add color to the pictures or the type. “There it is, in black and white.”

  —Froot Loops, bubble gum, cranapple juice, frozen waffles, Diet 7 Up.

  —Spray paint in pressurized cans represents very little advance over a can of paint you pry the lid off and spread with a brush.

  —Digital watches that can only tell us that it’s 8:50, not ten of nine.

  —The buzzers in cars that inform you that you haven’t fastened your seatbelt. What we need in a car is a buzzer that tells you where you put the keys.

  —Designer jeans. Designers have added very little but price to blue jeans.

  —Homogenized milk. There is a whole generation of people who don’t know that, left alone, cream rises to the top.

  —Cute sayings on license plates put there by state governments for promotional purposes. Maine is VACATIONLAND. Maine is also very cold in the winter, but the license plates don’t say so.

  —Remote-control television. The necessity for having to get up out of your chair and walk across the room to the television set made it more likely that you’d turn the thing off instead of switching from station to station all night, looking for something good that doesn’t exist.

  —Instant tea. All you do to make instant tea is put a spoonful in a cup and add hot water. All you do to make tea of tea that isn’t instant is put a tea bag in a cup and add hot water.

  All we can do is hope that this new $6 billion atom breaker-upper is more help to mankind than these items have been. If it’s successful, maybe they could develop a machine that would hurl two Twinkies at each other at a billion miles an hour.

  Any Day Now …

  Any Day Now …

  “I think we’re going to see fantastic breakthroughs in aircraft technology in the next ten years or so,” says Jerry N. Hefner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Advanced Vehicle Division.

  A newspaper story I read recently says that, among other things, new designs could reduce the drag on airplanes by enough to save the airlines $10 billion in gas bills every year.

  Sounds good, but don’t wait until the airlines pass that savings on to you. I’ve learned not to get excited about stories that promise “breakthroughs.”

  After reading that story my mind ran back to a newspaper article I’d read a long time ago so I went searching for it. The search took me almost all of Thursday but I found what I was looking for in an Associated Press story printed February 23, 1951.

  “New strides toward the development of the first atom-powered airplane—a craft that might fly 80 times around the world on one pound of fuel—were disclosed today,” the story began.

  “As the climax of four years of intensive research, the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission announced jointly that the first phase in the program to produce an atomic plane had now been completed.”

  The next phase, the story said, was to be conducted by the General Electric Company at its Lockland, Ohio, plant.

  Nineteen fifty-one? I thought to myself. That was thirty-eight years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever ridden on a nuclear airplane and I know darn well they haven’t developed an airplane that can fly eighty times around the world without stopping because they made that big deal about the Voyager, the plane that flew around it once without stopping. Maybe they’re keeping it secret.

  So I called General Electric to ask about the atom-powered airplane. When I mentioned the atom-powered airplane to a pleasant woman I talked to in the public relations office, she broke into gales of laughter.

  She said she thought there was a model of the engine they worked on in their little museum upstairs but confessed she didn’t really know much about it.

  Next I called the air force. A Colonel Greer in public relations said he couldn’t remember anything about it but he said he’d go to their historical section and see what he could find. That’s where I stand on my report on atomic-powered airplanes … nowhere.

  There must be a great breakthrough graveyard in the sky for new developments that sound good but never get beyond their one announcement. I remember one invention I looked forward to with great anticipation. On the cover of the last issue of Collier’s magazine, there was a picture of a man standing on a small, round platform that could lift him off the ground and take him up and over anything for short distances.

  Have you seen one of those in your hometown recently? They don’t seem to be selling them in mine even though, back in 1956, Collier’s promised we’d all have one pretty soon.

  World’s Fairs are a great place to see wonderful inventions you never see again in real life. When I was in high school I saw the “World of Tomorrow” at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. GE had a walking, talking robot that was going to take over a lot of dirty jobs for all of us in the future. In 1982 I saw another robot that was going to do all those jobs, at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, but I don’t notice a robot doing the dishes in our kitchen.

  Maybe the most promised, least delivered technological improvement around is the video telephone with which you could see the person you were talking with and be seen too. The first time I saw a demonstration of something called Phone-A-Vision was at another World’s Fair, in 1964. It was right around the corner … and it’s still around the same corner twenty-five years later.

  The moral to the story is, when you read about a new invention, don’t hold your breath until it’s available.

  You Can’t Go Back to School Again

  To return or not to return, that is the question when it comes to class reunions.

  This was a reunion year for both my college and high school classes and I attended both.

  It was alternately great, terrible, exhilarating, depressing, fun and boring. If, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again,” it is equally true that “You can’t go back to school again.” At a reunion, we’re all looking for something that is as gone as yesterday.

  I was surprised, though, at how quickly old relationships, both good and bad, were reestablished. The classmates I hadn’t liked much in school almost instantly irritated me again and I could see they felt the same hostility toward me. The years hadn’t dissipated whatever it was in each of our personalities that rubbed the other the wrong way.

  The good part was that when I met the people who had been friends in school, the warmth of our friendship was instantly renewed. It was sweet pleasure to be reminded of why I liked them so much.

  You don’t talk to anyone for long at a reunion. You envision spending hours reliving old times, but you don’t. There is almost no time to listen to anyone else’s life story or tell your own.

  I saw Carl across the room and headed through the crowd to say hello. We laughed about the Latin class we both failed and then our conversation was interrupted by a classmate. We never talked again, and when I got into bed that night, I remembered that the last time I’d seen Carl was at an Eighth Air Force base in England in 1942, where he’d been a B-17 pilot. Two days later he’d been shot down and spent two years in a German prisoner camp. Such is the condensation of reunion conversations that it never came up.

  There were students around, and they had a proprietary air that amused me. It was as though it were their school and we were intruders for the day. Those young students had no way of understanding that we knew the school as well as they did.
I looked at the blackboards, the familiar cracks in the marble floors, the locker room, the stairways and a desk I’d sat at for three years and I smiled at the students. It was their turn to be young.

  I talked to Walt. We sat next to each other in chapel because his last name began with R too. We had been friends but not close friends. He wasn’t in my group, I guess you’d say.

  “I never did much here,” he said. “I certainly didn’t distinguish myself.”

  It had never occurred to me before that he had thought that about himself when he was in school.

  “What are you doing now?” I asked.

  “I’m a heart surgeon practicing in Los Angeles,” he said.

  It was one of the depressing moments. I realized how cruel and exclusive a small group of us had been. We thought of ourselves as the leaders and the doers, and as much as half the class was shut out simply because of some quirk of personality that made them less acceptable to other kids when they were young.

  What business did we have shutting out of our group a fifteen-year-old boy with the ability inside him to become a heart surgeon?

  I don’t know whether I’ll go to another reunion. Today I wouldn’t but in five years I may. I like the continuity lifelong friendships provide but there is something artificial about the reunion setting.

  Schools encourage graduates to return to their reunions because reunions generate the kind of enthusiasm for the school that induces alumni to give money. I was thinking that there are some other groups of people I’ve spent important parts of my life with who I’ll never see again simply because there’s nothing in it for the organizations to which we belonged. They have no interest in bringing us together and we wouldn’t bother on our own.

  Maybe just as well.

  The Race Against Time

  Well, it looks now as though it’s going to be a race against time for those of us past forty years old to see whether we live forever. They keep chipping away at the things that are killing people and it looks as though there’s a good chance they’ll have everything licked in our lifetime.

  The Food and Drug Administration announced that it has approved a new drug, lovastatin, that will lower our cholesterol level. Cholesterol is the one that clogs up your veins and arteries like rust in a pipe and produces heart attacks when the blood can’t get through.

  I read the headline on that story and went to the kitchen to get a bowl of ice cream, but when I came back to the living room to finish the story and eat the ice cream, I found that the medical experts were saying you should still keep your cholesterol level down for the drug to work effectively.

  “The drug works best,” Nobel Prize-winning Dr. Michael S. Brown said, “when taken in conjunction with a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet.”

  Nothing is ever perfect—that’s the trouble with all these new discoveries.

  The scientific and medical communities are going to have to step up the speed of their inventions, preventions and discoveries if they hope to have all the illnesses known to the human mind and body either cured or preventable before one of them catches up with us. Some of us don’t have all the time in the world left.

  What I want, if any of you medical scientists are reading this, is a small pill that can be taken once a day before dinner, with a martini, that will cure anything I already have and prevent anything I might catch in the future. In addition to inhibiting cancer, heart disease, cirrhosis of the liver, kidney failure and shingles, I’d expect this little pill to keep me from getting Alzheimer’s and palsy and at the same time restore any names to my memory that I can’t think of. Neither do I want to read a lot of warnings on the label telling me that if I take too much of the stuff it could produce bad side effects. This all-purpose, live-forever pill should be 100 percent side-effects-less.

  I know you medical scientists can do it if you put your minds to it. If some of you were a little older, you might have more incentive to work harder on the problem.

  Lovastatin will be sold by the Merck drug company by prescription under the name Mevacor. Don’t ask me how they arrived at these names or why they’re changing it from “lovastatin” to “Mevacor” when they sell it.

  You can’t knock the drug companies that are developing all these miracle medicines, though. It’s capitalism at its best. The drug companies want to get rich and they spend a lot of money developing new medicine to that end. That’s the way capitalism is supposed to work. Merck and Company developed lovastatin and it deserves to make a lot of money.

  Just as soon as science has licked old age and all the diseases we humans die of, we’re going to have to face the problem of where all of us are going to live. If no one ever dies, there’s going to be a honey of a housing shortage. Between our new liberal attitude toward promiscuous sex, the outlawing of abortion and the elimination of death, this is going to be one crowded planet in another hundred years.

  I just wanted to make sure you heard the good news about this new drug. Lovastatin will sell for about $1.25 a dose and doctors estimate a person with a high cholesterol level will need four doses a day, so it isn’t going to be cheap.

  I figure that if lovastatin costs $5 a day for the next hundred years, that’ll run me $182,500. Listen, the way I enjoy life, it’ll be worth it, even if I have to borrow.

  The Hollow Breadbasket

  It’s always surprising, considering how slowly things seem to progress from day to day, how quickly great changes take place in the world.

  Remember the Egypt of your history books? Remember what happened to Rome and Greece? In recent times Great Britain has gone from one of the dominant world powers to a quaint country with waning influence in world affairs. Japan has developed from an inconsequential maker of cheap trinkets for our five-and-ten-cent stores to the biggest producer of quality goods in the world.

  Is it possible some major and terrible change is taking place in our great country? Are we seeing it happen without knowing it’s that big?

  We can console ourselves with the thought that there was probably never a time in the two hundred years since the Constitution was written when it didn’t seem as though things were getting worse. If that’s true, these must be typical times because things sure seem to be getting worse.

  What do I mean? I mean American industry isn’t making most things very well. I mean our scientific work is being done more and more by foreign visitors and less and less by native Americans. The brightest kids in many of our schools weren’t born here. Our money isn’t worth much in foreign countries. Our manufactured goods don’t sell well abroad.

  A typically discouraging “these days” story appeared in the paper the other day. General Electric and General Motors are fighting a battle with the government, trying to get permission to use Soviet rockets for lifting their communication satellites into space. They want to use the Russian rockets because our space program doesn’t have any.

  Can you believe it? GE and GM going to the Russians for help? Here are two of the biggest corporations in the United States admitting that if they want to put their satellites in space, they have to use Russian rockets because the Russians are making them better than we are. Here are two companies that ought to be spending more time making their products, like rockets maybe, and less time making money, pleading to their government to let them use Soviet products. It’s a sad day. First thing you know, the Russians will be selling us light bulbs, toaster ovens and tanks, which George Bush says they make so well.

  In spite of its rockets, the Soviet Union doesn’t yet seem about to bury the United States economically, but then who would have thought the Japanese would be doing it twenty-five years ago? I recall we used to laugh at the large parties of visiting Japanese engineers who always were being shown through the technical areas at CBS. There are no longer any Japanese visitors. Obviously, they got what they wanted and now they’re selling CBS much of the equipment it uses in those technical areas. I’m waiting for the Japanese to take over Dan Rather and the evening news
.

  In a typical month recently the United States paid Japan $4 billion more for goods than Japan paid us. Our biggest export to Japan in terms of cash is food. That’s cold comfort because the biggest reason we have more food than we can eat and Japan doesn’t is that the United States is twenty-five times as big as Japan and has the land to grow it on. Japan isn’t even as big as our state of Montana and has half the population of the United States.

  What should we do? How do we get back to where we were when we were making so many things better than anyone else in the world?

  Columbia University in New York has hired a Wall Street wheeler-dealer to teach a course in corporate takeovers. It’s called “Corporate Raiding: The Art of War.” Bright young Americans are being taught not how to make something but how to make money by taking over established companies built on hard work.

  Did you ever have one of those days when nothing seems funny?

  Under Underwear Ads

  For many years, before people had clothes dryers in their basements, every young boy’s knowledge of what women wore under their dresses was formed by what he saw hanging from clotheslines in backyards.

  It was a more realistic picture of the truth than what a young boy sees today. When underwear was hung out to dry, Sears, Roebuck was advertising women’s underwear in its catalog to show how warm and practical underwear was. The women modeling the undergarments were not all built like Marilyn Monroe, and there was nothing about the ads that would cause readers to linger over them if they weren’t in the market for the product.

  Somewhere along the line, something went wrong. If the ads carried in the slick women’s magazines today were printed in Playboy, someone would be trying to ban them from the newsstands. Perfectly respectable people who wouldn’t dream of having pictures of mostly naked women around the house have these magazines right on the living-room coffee table where everyone can see them.