1
SEPTEMBER 2000
I was just going to say, when I was interrupted. . . .
âNobody interrupted you,â said my wife. âPeople have tried, butââ
That was a literary reference, dear, the first line from The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes, author of âThe Wonderful âOne-Hoss Shay,ââ âThe Chambered Nautilus,â andâ
âOther poems used mainly to torture high school students,â said my young assistant, Max.
Itâs a shame the way the classics are treated in our schools, I continued. Holmes was a brilliant aphorist. Americans donât read anymore. Somebody sent me some quotes from The Autocrat. Whereâs that letter?
âRight next to you,â said my wife, âunder the remote.â
Listen to this: He must be a poor creature who does not often repeat himself. Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, âKnow thyself,â never alluding to that sentiment again.
âHmmm,â said my wife.
And this: All uttered thought is of the nature of an excretion. A man instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in print so soon as it has matured.
âGood point,â said my wife, flipping through some manuscript pages of mine.
âI printed out the rough draft of your article on the UN 2000 Millennium Summit,â said Max, âand Iâm almost done with the fact-checking. I just have to go to the UN web site andââ
I stopped him. Max, Oliver Wendell Holmes declares: All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called âfacts.â Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two which they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs.
âYouâre welcome,â said Max.
And, Max, here is Holmes on the subject of computersâa hundred and fifty years ago. He hears about Babbageâs mechanical calculating device and foresees the whole pathetic computer age: What a satire is that machine on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; which turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better. Holmes calls it the triumph of the ciphering hand-organ.
âMax,â said my wife, âI thought you were going to teach P.J. how to use the laptop.â
âIâve tried.â
Holmes was a man of towering intellect, of wide and deep scholarshipâessayist, poet, professor, physicianâ
âAnd major babe magnet for Transcendentalist chicks, Iâll bet,â said Max, âat least compared to Thoreau.â
He gave the Atlantic Monthly its name.
âWhat,â asked Max, âwere they going to call it? The Cape Cod Nude Beach Express?â
Holmes anticipated the germ theory of disease. He fathered the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He demolished the Puritan doctrine of predestination.
âAnd thought he was fated to do it,â said my wife, the Catholic.
Anyhow, as I was just going to say . . . . What was I going to say, dear?
âYou were probably going to say, âWhereâd that remote go?ââ
Speaking of electronic devices [or electric devices, and Iâm not sure I precisely know the difference, although I intend to have Max find out because Iâm writing an article for the online magazine freeSpam about how the computer is the triumph of the ciphering hand-organ], the other day our daughter, Muffin, announced, âI want a cell phone.â
âYouâre three,â said my wife.
âBut I love them.â
âAsk your father.â
I love them too, Muffin. Daddy loves cell phones because Daddy doesnât have a cell phone. Daddy doesnât have a cell phone because Daddy canât see the tiny numbers on the buttons without his reading glasses. And Daddy doesnât have his reading glasses because he left them on the shelf under the Grand Central Station pay phone, which Daddy was using to call you because Daddy doesnât have a cell phone.
And that is what Daddy loves about cell phonesânot having one. It makes your father unreachable. Being unreachable is a potent status symbol in the world today. Every dateless pimple nose with a dot.com has a Lexus, a business jet, a weekend house in Phuket, and a cell phone. But, Muffin, you just try getting the Queen of England on the blower. Or try finding the direct-dial number for the president of the United Statesâunless youâre a rich campaign fund-raiser or a fat girl in saucy underwear. And those are two things that I trust you, Muffin, will never be.
[Although, by this time, Muffin had in fact wandered off to watch the Sugared Cereal Channel on TV. And so, come to notice it, had everyone else.]
But as far-too-accessible Bill Clinton has proven, out-of-touch is the important thing to be. Not that anyone would be able to get in touch with me anyway. If I had a cell phone, Iâd lose it. I lose everything. I left my first wife in the back of a cab somewhere. And what a great way to be important this is. Iâm a big deal because my Zippo slips between the couch cushions, and I once forgot being married. That is so much easier than making a fortune or inheriting a crown.
I also love cell phones because cell phones punish the most discourteous people in the worldâphone usersâby giving phone users the punishment they deserveâphone calls.
Why does the cell phone always ring while youâre having sex? This would be okay if the ringer were set on vibrate and the cell phone were properly located. But it isnât. The cell phone is in the pocket of your pants, which are hanging over the back of a chair next to the bed with your friendâs wife in it, that you are hiding under because your friend has just returned, unexpectedly, from a business trip.
âExcuse me?â said my wife from the next room.
Just a joke, I shouted from the sofa. But why does a ringing cell phone take precedence over every other activity in life? People are willing to interrupt anything, including hiding under the bed, to answer a cell phone. During papal audiences, John Paul II probably hears, âScuzi, Papa, mia pizza deliverioâ.
Although, in fairness, the situation was as bad or worse before cell phones were invented. Muffin does not remember the pre-wireless era when people had to carry their large desk-model telephones around with them on the street, trailing miles and miles of cord. The result was an alarming tangle. It was this, rather than mismanagement of the economy or Jimmy Carterâs incompetence, that caused the well-known malaise of the late 1970s.
And what about Call Waiting? How rude is that? Why not have FâWaiting? That way you could leap up, right in the middle of being discovered by your angry cuckolded friend, and say, âSorry, my other fâis on the living room couch.â
Why do we need cell phones? Why do we want phone calls? Think about the phone calls we get. How often do we get the following calls?
âYouâve won the lottery!â
âItâs a girl!â
âUncle Ned just died and left us a golf resort in Florida!â
No, the cell phone rings and itâs âHoneyââyou can tell by her voice sheâs still furious about your friendâs wifeââon the way home would you pick up the dry cleaning and a gallon of milk, a package of frozen peas, new linoleum for the kitchen, and an in-ground pool?â
What do we need cell phones for? Certainly not to say anything. Especially not in America. Americans are so inarticulate that 411 had to be supplied with a recordingââWhat city? What listing?ââbecause the phone company couldnât train operators to say anything but âHuh?â and âWhassup?â
And all those people on their cell phones, to whom are they talking? Men are famously unable to communicate. Women are always on the other line. Parents donât talk to kids these days. Kids say âHuh?â and âWhassup?â You canât call people at work anymore because nobody comes in to the office, and if you try their cell phone you get âno service.â
Yet everyone everywhere is always on a cell phone. The best kind come with an earpiece and a microphone built into the wire so that cell phone users donât even look like theyâre using a cell phone; they look like crazy people raving on street corners. This, of course, is hard on the crazy people who really are raving on street corners and whoâinstead of receiving sympathy and 25 centsâare assumed to be calling their brokers. Anyway, whomever it is that cell phone users are raving at, it keeps them from raving at me. So I love cell phones.
In fact, I love cell phones so much that Iâm getting one. Iâm getting a top-of-the-line highly miniaturized cell phone with all the exotic features. Iâm buying new reading glasses. Iâm programming my cell phone to continuously auto-dial the headquarters of both of the current presidential campaigns. Then Iâm going back to New York to hang my cell phone under the tail of a Central Park carriage horse.
âItâs for you,â said my wife. âYour godson has been elected to the Model UN. Heâs going to represent all the high school students from his region.â
Since when did Darien become a nation? Hello, Nick. Congratulations! And, boy, are you in luck! You know, Iâve just come back from covering the UN Millennium Summit for Instant Access Quarterly. Iâve got everything you need. Max, would you get my UN piece and all my notes? Theyâre in the file cabinet. Bring the whole drawer. Got a second, Nick?
You should have seen this. I wish Iâd taken you with me. You wouldnât have believed it, Nick. One hundred heads of state, forty-seven heads of government, three crown princes, and assorted other eminencies such as Yasir Arafat. It was the largest gathering of world leaders in the history of mankindâand no one cared.
Actually, Nick, everyone caredâabout the traffic. New York local TV news led, the first night, with stories on the gridlock caused by 1,300 UN dignitary vehicles, including twelve cars just for the president of Georgia. And not even Newt Gingrich Georgia but the somewhat less populous sliver of mountain chaos squeezed between Azerbaijan and the Black Sea. ABC World News Tonight began with a Peter Jennings quip about Manhattan traffic jams. The next morning the front-page New York Times article noted, in its lead, âTraffic was backed up across the East Side yesterday because of a crush of limousines carrying VIPs everywhere from the United Nations Plaza Hotel to the Bronx Zoo.â The latter being the big non-traffic story in the New York press. Denis Sassou-Nguesso, president of the Congo Republic, visited the Congo Gorilla Forest exhibit to see gorillas that come from the Congo where heâs president. A global convergence, we-are-one-world moment? Or gridlock on Planet of the Apes?
The next morning, a TV news show reported that Bangladesh had a thirteen-car motorcade. This was modest compared to President Clintonâs, which, a traffic cop told me, consisted of forty-five vehicles. âAnd the last two times they were in town,â said the cop, âthey had accidents.â But Bangladesh is a country where 29 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Figuring the thirteen motorcade cars and drivers at $50 an hour, twelve hours a day, for the four days of the summit, the Bangladesh delegation just took the bread out of the mouths of 31,000 people. Not that Iâm accusing the delegation of living large. I saw the entire collection of Bangladeshi Lincoln Town Cars lined up at a Wendyâs on Second Avenue.
The indifference with which the Millennium Summit was greeted by everyone except commuters says a lot about present-day global politics. Not to mention what it says about present-day global politiciansâthis was no confab of Churchills, Roosevelts, Hitlers, Tojos, and Stalins. And what a relief. An excess of international leadership usually results in bullets and breadlines.
Maybe the worldâBangladesh to the contraryâhas become rich enough to be bored by global politics. This is good. Politics cause more grief than money. Take the Vietnam War, for instance. How much would the U.S. government have had to pay 47,000 Americans, putting the job out for bid under strict free-market conditions, to go die in Vietnam?
Not that money canât be used to do harm. Ted Turner says heâs giving a billion dollars to the UN. Turnerâs overfunded UN Foundation helped sponsor a convocation of more than a thousand religious and spiritual leaders at the UN the week before the Millennium Summit. Thank Godâas it wereâI didnât have to cover that. The purpose of this âMillennium World Peace Summitâ was, according to the mystical gatheringâs communications director, âto see how religious leaders can bring the power of their own spiritual traditions to work with UN forces . . . to help reduce conflict.â For fear of conflict with the communist Chinese, however, the Dalai Lama wasnât invited. The communist Chinese being atheists, Iâd say religious and spiritual leaders are 0 for I so far.
But, Nick, I donât want to give you the impression that I donât like the United Nations. I do. I think itâs extremely cool, especially the whole black-helicopter New World Order secret-global-government thing. I love it. Itâll be like DC Comicsâ Justice League International, except the Security Council members will have superpowers such as the ability to sit through six-hour meetings without going to the bathroom, the ability to figure out what âDocument 5: Text of draft optional protocol submitted by the Chairperson (E/CN.6/1997/WH/L.1)â means, the ability to simultaneously translate the click language of the Kalahari bushmen into Farsi, and the ability to fly (business class). And to judge by the crowds in Manhattanâs pricier restaurants during the Millennium Summit, UN superheroes will also have supper powers. I can hardly wait. I figure a world government run by the UN will be like getting an old, purblind, half-deaf substitute teacherâor like being baby-sat by your fifty-two-year-old godfather when Iâm drinking. Have you seen The Art of War? Wesley Snipes is a member of a United Nations covert action unit, and heâs completely out of control.
âUncle Peej,â said my godson, who seemed to be in a hurry, âcould you, like, get Max to e-mail this stuff to me?â
Dear Nick,
I was just going to say, when I was interrupted. . . .
Because The Art of War had a lot of good chase scenes and explosions, it was with a certain measure of enthusiasm that I went, last week, to the United Nations Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit Media Division/Department of Public Information to get my 2000 UN Millennium Summit press credentials. Except I couldnât find the Division/Department. Though with a name as long as that, youâd think just the size of the sign would give it away. The UN was cordoned off by thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of uniformed officers, security guards, and plainclothesmen, every one of whom was almost, but not quite, too busy and annoyed to point me in the wrong direction. I mistakenly got into the line for the Uganda missionâa long line. Why were people lined up to get into the Uganda mission? To get Uganda immigration visas? Were their own countries so screwed up that they wanted to move to Uganda? Actually, probably, yes.
In due time I found the proper line. It was a much shorter line. In fact, it wasnât a very long line at all, notwithstanding which I stood in it for an hour and fifteen minutes. The Division/Department was bare and stuffy. The only decorations were photocopied flyers Scotch-taped to the wall, bearing such enticing messages as:
MEDI ADVISORY
PHOTO OP
The Presidents of Finland and Namibia,
the two co-chairs of the Summit,
will meet each other for the first time
at 6:20 P.M.
today, 5 September,
in the neck area outside the
Delegatesâ Lounge
Well, who knows, maybe sparks would fly. (The Delegatesâ Lounge has a âneck areaâ?)
The credentials were prepared, waiting for us journalists to collect them. But our names seemed to have been filed according to shoe size, or phase of the moon when application was submitted, or by using the ancient Cretan Linear A alphabet, the key to which has been lost in the mists of time.
UN functionaries were arrayed behind wobbly folding tables. Whenever a journalist approached and asked for credentials, the functionaries would express mild shock and dismay. Such a request came as a complete surprise to them. The functionaries would consult among themselves, agree at last to search for the appropriate document, then plunge into an enormous heap of manila folders and stay there for the rest of the afternoon.
Maybe this is why we donât see so many of those black helicopters. The pilots are probably stuck down at the United Nations Secret Weapon and Unmarked Aircraft Registration and Licensing Division/Department of World Domination while somebody looks for the helicopter keys.
Or maybe the pilots got arrested in some foul-up among the various competing security agencies on hand. There was at least one pack of big-buddies-with-sunglasses for every foreign poobah, plus Secret Service, State Department Security, UN Security, FBI, ATF, NYPDâthe works. Forget polĂticos, this was the largest gathering of guys with radio earpieces sticking out of their jacket collars in the history of mankind. And all of the security people were listening to voices through those earpieces, making them twitch and look around and mutter to themselves. It was like arriving in the midst of a gigantic convention of unusually well-dressed schizophrenics. If these fellows got together and made any treaties and agreements among themselves, weâre all in trouble.
Itâs a shame the police types were too busy to do anything about actual criminals, such as about one-fourth of the world leaders on hand. The political opponents of Zimbabweâs Robert Mugabe have a knack for conveniently dying, and Mugabe uses the thugs in his political party to terrorize landowners. Chinaâs Jiang Zemin is brutal with Falun Gong religious dissidents and murderous in Tibet. Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir, president of Sudan, leads a genocidal war against Christian and animist tribes in his country. Mohammad Khatamiâs Iran sponsors worldwide terrorism. Islam A. Karimov is a vicious dictator in Uzbekistan. God knows what Vladimir Putin has been up to in Russia, but itâs nothing nice, say the Chechens. Castro is an old butcher from way back. And, in the matter of mopery, sexual misdemeanors, and lurking with criminal intent, there was our own Bill Clinton.
At leas...