Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  I’m not complaining, mind you, just commenting. The underwear ads are sexier and more provocative because the women in the ads look like intelligent, likable women. They don’t look like the tough, been-around broads who appear naked for Penthouse. Even though the women in the underwear ads look prim and proper, it is apparently difficult to get nice women to do this kind of posing. As an inducement to get them to do it, the ones who stand there having their pictures taken in underwear are paid more than the ones who are pictured fully clothed.

  My question is this, though: Does the average woman really imagine that she’ll look like the women in the ads if she buys the underwear they’re selling? Under the underwear, the women in the ads have one-in-a-million, near-perfect bodies. I should think the average woman would feel terrible every time she looked at an underwear ad. How is she ever going to live up to that image? You could say the average man might feel the same inadequacy when he looks at the unnaturally handsome dog in the shirt ad but at least the man in the shirt ad has his clothes on.

  It’s hard to believe many women are fooled into buying the underwear being advertised because they think they’d look like the women in the ads if they wear it. I even find the ads make a strange assumption. They seem to assume that a lot of people are going to see women in their underwear.

  There are lots of fur-coat ads in the magazines and, looking at the underwear ads, you realize why it is women need fur coats.

  To do some research, I went to the library to leaf through the magazines that carry ads for women’s underwear. A trendy magazine called Working Woman has pictures of young women so scantily dressed you’d think NOW, the National Organization for Women, would object to the models being associated with working women. You wonder what their work is. I couldn’t help noting, too, that the less women’s underwear covers, the more it costs.

  Magazines like Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Mademoiselle and Vogue have underwear and outerwear ads on adjacent pages, and I notice a new phenomenon here. While the women in the underwear ads are wearing elaborate and lacy undergarments that obviously cost a lot of money, the women in the pictures who are considered to be fully dressed seem to be wearing little or no underwear at all. If the women wearing dresses had on the undergarments pictured in the ads, the underwear would be showing, and it isn’t.

  Of course, some of the underwear is so elaborate and some of the outerwear so skimpy that it’s hard for a man looking at these pictures to know which is which. What often appears to be a nightgown turns out to be an evening dress.

  The Fake Fat of the Land

  Many of you will probably be getting thinner pretty soon now because several companies have announced that they’ve made a new low-calorie, cholesterol-free substitute for fat that they’ll have in food in the grocery stores next year.

  I’m sorry I won’t be joining you in losing weight by eating this stuff. If I lose any weight, it’s going to be by cutting down on food, not by eating imitation fat. I have never tasted any imitation food that was close to the real thing. When the label says “with a real buttery flavor,” it means there’s no butter in it, and if it tastes like butter to you simply because they call it “buttery,” you’re a poor judge of both butter and good food.

  The NutraSweet Company, part of Monsanto, one of the country’s largest makers of chemical products, announced something called Simplesse. The company says Simplesse has been made to taste, feel and look like fat but will have 80 percent fewer calories. It would be used in things like ice cream, mayonnaise, yogurt, salad dressing and cheese spreads. One of the shortcomings this new product has as a substitute for butter or shortening of any kind is that you can’t cook with it. You can’t heat it.

  I have some observations about all this:

  —The ingredients in commercial cheese spreads are already as suspect as the ingredients in a cheap hot dog. If I want a cheese spread, I buy good cheese and spread it.

  —If we’re going to have salad, I make a salad dressing. I don’t understand anyone who buys bottled salad dressing that’s half as good and costs four times as much.

  —I like yogurt but most commercial yogurt is so chemically concocted anyway that if they want to play around with a food, yogurt would be a good one for them to concentrate on.

  —NutraSweet already makes the artificial sweetener aspartame. I have no objection to aspartame and occasionally buy a Diet Coke that’s made with it. Just don’t try to tell me it tastes like sugar.

  I don’t care what they put in cheese spreads or salad dressings or soft drinks but I object to anyone tampering with ice cream. Laws governing the ingredients in ice cream have been effective and have kept the quality of commercial ice creams at a high level compared to many products. It would be a shame if they started fooling around with ice cream by making it with fake anything. If you don’t want the calories in ice cream, don’t eat ice cream.

  I’d prefer that Monsanto left our ice cream alone and stuck to the things that made the company big in the first place … things like fertilizers and herbicides.

  Just as I hate to see dog food in the same aisle with the cans of tuna fish in the supermarket, I don’t like a fertilizer company making food. Anyway, we already have enough companies trying to improve their profits by trading on the great American dream of looking beautiful by dieting.

  Procter & Gamble, the soap company, has a new product too. It is called Olestra. I don’t know where it got the name. Maybe it was the name of the original Mr. Procter’s wife.

  Olestra is different from Simplesse. Olestra is purely synthetic and goes right through your body without changing itself or your body. Simplesse, on the other hand, is a protein that your digestive system has to work on.

  Monsanto’s NutraSweet Company takes protein particles from egg whites and milk, grinds them up and heats them and makes them into the same shape as fat particles. I don’t know how they do that.

  “This creates the smoothness and richness our tongue knows as fat,” says Robert Shapiro, head of NutraSweet. “It’s really an illusion of the taste buds.”

  Maybe, Mr. Shapiro, but my taste buds are very experienced and hard to kid. I don’t want any of your fake food. I don’t want to be fooled. If I’m going to overeat, I want the real thing.

  As my father used to say, “Even if it was good, I wouldn’t like it.”

  Handpicked Genes

  The scientific loser of the century, as far as anything of practical importance to mankind goes, was the landing on the moon. It was a great $25 billion television show but not much else.

  Nothing fascinates us more than considering what changes will take place on Earth after every one of us alive today is dead and gone.

  Most of the science fiction written about the future centers on space exploration and life on other planets. There are always rocket ships on the book jackets. Maybe, though, the greatest changes will take place right here on Earth.

  The National Research Council is spending $200 million a year on a fifteen-year effort to find out all about the genes that make people the way they are. In fifteen years, spending at that rate would cost us $3 billion. It sounds like a better place to put our money than on the moon.

  You may recall from high school biology that every human being has forty-six chromosomes. When a man and a woman have sex that results in the fertilization of the egg in the female by a sperm from the male, the chromosomes divide evenly. The new life gets twenty-three of them from the man and twenty-three from the woman but no one can predict in advance which ones the baby will get. The chromosomes contain the genes, and it’s the mixture of all these little rascals from two human beings that produces a totally different third human being.

  “She looks just like you” means the baby got your blue-eyed gene or your snub-nose or blond-hair gene, but chances are the kid has more traits from ancestors of yours that you never knew than she does of yours.

  If she’s lucky, she didn’t get your bad-temper gene or the gene that makes one of yo
ur toes go in the wrong direction.

  In talking about their proposal, the scientists emphasize how much the study of our genes would mean in the elimination of some forms of cancer, cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s and manic depression. You can bet, though, that this isn’t where the study of genes is going to get into trouble. The trouble will come when they start fooling around with what we’re really like.

  What’s the Supreme Court going to rule when a hospital starts advertising that, for $1,500, it can get you the baby you want, boy or girl. If we end up with twice as many boys as girls, would the government pass a law forcing people to have girl babies until the numbers were equal?

  What will the whole human race look like in a thousand years if everyone’s father and mother can choose how their child will look and act? If blacks decide they’re discriminated against because they’re black and wish, therefore, to be a different color, will black parents take on different color genes? Everyone will want to be taller. Will we fit into our cars or our houses? Will they have to raise the hoop on the basketball court? And if our cars and our houses get bigger to fit us, will there be room on Earth?

  If scientists can locate the genes that control intelligence, the whole world should end up smarter. Will smarter make people happier?

  The danger, of course, is that we’d all end up too much alike. It is the stray, freak, longshot gene or combination of genes that produces the unpredicted genius and makes the human race so interesting. It’s those aberrant genes that no scientist could plan that gave us Albert Einstein.

  If anyone could lay down the law and make fooling around with genes illegal everywhere in the world forever, it would be a good idea, but whenever there is knowledge about anything, someone uses that knowledge and you can bet that if gene-changing doesn’t take place in the United States, it’ll take place somewhere else in the world.

  Americans will be six-footers in an eight-foot world.

  Bigger Isn’t Better

  The easy stores to go to are the big ones that have a lot of everything. You can go to a department store in a mall that has dresses, pants, paint, books, golf clubs, underwear, watches and wastebaskets. Upstairs they have furniture and rugs. Downstairs they have refrigerators and television sets. These stores are owned by a company whose name is listed on the stock exchange. There is a store just like it in the next city and the refrigerators and television sets are downstairs there, too.

  As an addicted recreational shopper, I go to these big stores and I like them, but I mourn the gradual decline in the number of small stores that have just one thing and are owned by one person, not a corporation.

  The Small Business Administration in Washington says 600,000 new small businesses have started up every year in the 1980s. During the 1970s there was an average of only 365,000 new small businesses a year. I hope that in the year 2089, a few hundred of the small family businesses that start up this year will be celebrating their hundredth year and will have a little footnote in gold letters on the sign out front saying EST. 1989. I hope the great-grandchildren of the founder will still be in the business, but in spite of this optimistic announcement by the SBA, you can’t tell me there aren’t fewer little businesses than there used to be.

  The trouble is that according to an old rule of thumb in the business world, four out of five new businesses go belly up within five years. We lose something every time a small store or a small company that makes something goes out of business. It’s more like a death in the family than a business failure. When the little bakery is bought by the big bakery, the bread is never so good again. No big corporation taking over a smaller company has ever improved the product. I could name a thousand products whose quality declined under the new management of a corporate takeover. To tell you the truth, it’s hard to think of a big brand product whose quality has not declined in the past ten years.

  One of the reasons it’s becoming more difficult for a small store to stay in business is that the small manufacturer, which once supplied the store with good quality products that were distinctive and different from those mass-produced for the chain stores, has been absorbed by the giant competitor or driven out of business. The small retail store, without a small manufacturer, ends up buying many of the same products the chain stores sell and the chain stores sell them for less. No one, not even a small-store customer as myself, can stand to pay $2.68 for an item he knows he can get for $1.98 someplace else.

  I am not ungrateful to the big chain bookstores that sell millions of books. My heart, though, is with the small bookstore in your own town or in your neighborhood. It is likely that the proprietor—more often than not a woman—has read most of the books in the store and, while she’s in business to make a living, she loves books better than money. In the big chain bookstore, a book may sell for 10 percent off but the salesperson has not read it or, very likely, any other book in the store, either.

  The big stores have had a bad effect on the little stores in another way too. The little guys often have to band together and buy from some kind of cooperative so they can buy in volume. They get all their merchandise from one supplier, which puts them in a better competitive position with the giants. The bad part is, the quality of the merchandise in the small stores then isn’t any better than the quality in the big ones. Furthermore, one small store is just like another.

  I think you fellows in the sales department at newspapers that depend a lot on big chain stores for advertising revenues know this is all in good fun. Just kidding, fellas.

  Graduation: End or Beginning?

  May seems early for graduation ceremonies but a lot of colleges have them then. The more a college charges, the earlier it has its graduation.

  Graduation day is one of the most abrupt endings we come to in our whole lives. Most things dwindle away or, little by little, we change what we’re doing. Not graduation. That’s it. The end. Period.

  Because of the abrupt interruption in life’s activities for the graduate, there are very few times in anyone’s life so bittersweet as that final day at high school or college. Graduates are glad it’s over but they’re sad it’s over, too, and they’re scared about their future.

  Considering how much hostility and suspicion there is toward any really educated person by almost everyone with less than a high school education, we’re lucky so many young people recognize what a good thing a higher education is.

  Some people consider it almost a badge of honor not to have gone to high school. If they’ve been successful at all or even if they haven’t, they brag about how little education they’ve had, just as if their ignorance had helped. They don’t consider anything a college graduate does for a living as real work.

  Last weekend I was joking with a friend of mine who never went to high school.

  “I been working all day,” he said. “You probably ain’t done a decent day’s work in your life. Real work, I mean.”

  He was kidding but only sort of. The fact that I get up at 5:37 every morning and don’t come home until 6:30 in the evening doesn’t impress him at all. He doesn’t know how I spend my time but he’s not willing to concede it’s work because I wear a necktie and don’t lift anything.

  I suppose the resentment the uneducated have toward others is natural enough. One of the simple pleasures of life is to feel superior to someone. It doesn’t have to be a mean feeling. Everyone needs to feel superior about something and there are lots of people who manage to feel superior about some pretty funny things. If I know how to change the oil in my car and you don’t, I feel superior to you in this one regard even though you may be a nuclear physicist. All I have to do to feel pleasantly superior is to think about what I know, and ignore what you know that I don’t.

  The argument that will never be resolved in education is how much the process should be directed toward teaching practical subjects that will help students make a living and how much education should be pure academic work, the only practical end to which is the pleasure of knowing.
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br />   There isn’t much money in just knowing things, as any out-of-work college professor can tell you, but I hope we never give up on education for its own sake. Even though there isn’t any great commercial demand for philosophers, Shakespearean scholars or experts on the works of Byron, Keats and Shelley, I hope we continue to have students who devote their education to these matters.

  Kingman Brewster, once president of Yale, said, “Perhaps the most fundamental value of a liberal education is that it makes life more interesting.

  “It allows you to think things which do not occur to the less learned and it makes it less likely that you will be bored with life.”

  I like my proud know-nothing friend but the world would be a sad place without young people who go to the trouble of suspending their lives for four years while they go to college.

  A Death in the Family

  I’ve listened to a hundred dutiful clergymen try, without success, to mitigate the sorrow of death for weeping survivors by quoting the Twenty-third Psalm or by soothingly suggesting death is something other than a tragedy. No one, though, uses words so well as to make friends and relatives of the deceased feel good at a funeral.

  The death of an institution can never be so sad, but the end of a newspaper has many of the elements of the death of a friend. The Knickerbocker News in Albany, New York, was laid to rest at 2:30 P.M. on April 15, 1988, and nothing I can say about its demise can mitigate the sorrow for those who knew it. I knew it.

  The Knick, as it was familiarly known, was part of my life because I grew up with it. When I was eight I waited for it to come. My friend Bud Duffie and I would spread it on the front porch to read the latest comic-strip episodes of Buck Rogers, Ben Webster and Little Orphan Annie.