KEEPING UP

My good friend Ace from Phoenix by way of the center of the universe, Brooklyn, came up with a great idea the other day: a moratorium on progress so that some of us can catch up. I think he's on to something here. Maybe a court injunction to prevent Apple from introducing a new iPhone every two months. It is clear by now that our lives have already been revolutionized about as much as they're going to be by a slightly different cell phone with a couple of new features. And all those satellites getting shot into orbit? If they cut that out for a year or two would anybody notice? They are already being used for completely frivolous purposes, like giving each and every one of of us the ability to spy on some guy's house half a world away. Was this necessary? Were we in such dire need of new amusements? What, not enough violent moronic video games on the market?

And will humanity be subjected to undue suffering if our televisions are low-definition for a few more years? The advantages of seeing every liver spot on Larry King's neck are as yet unclear to the average viewer. And having a moratorium on progress will allow some of us to finally clean out our closets and garages of some of yesterday's cutting edge technology that didn't work out all that well, starting with the high tech kitchen gadgets that didn't make meal preparation a snap. Unless you're considering taking up grazing or hunting like a predator and eating your meat raw while it still struggles for life, making a decent meal will always take some time. Get over it. Or go to an Italian restaurant and let a Mexican do all the work.

We can also start recycling all those electronic gizmos that didn't make our lives any easier or even do what they were supposed to do. Without going into particulars, check your own closet and garage and see if there's anything sitting there collecting dust that if you hooked it up would make life smooth and stress-free. It's pretty much the opposite, which is why these things are stored next to your space age exercise machines that never did give you those perfect abs, buns of steel or contoured legs in just ten minutes a day.

Which goes to show us that one of the most ancient technologies developed by humanity is still a dominant and life-shaping force. No, not fossil fuels, but the art of the scam. For every Henry Ford and Bill Gates offering consumers a useful product having a positive impact on their lives there are a hundred guys out there selling salad shooters, ways to clean your bathroom with zero effort, little electronic boxes that do nothing useful but seem pretty cool to have for about a week or so. The average American household probably has about 350 electronic gizmos collecting dust or being used to level a table somewhere.

One of the better scams is a tiny thing you plug into the wall that emits sounds that drive insects crazy so they won't come in your house. It has pretty glowing lights to tell you it's working, one of the more crucial elements in snake-oil selling. The beauty of it is, at least from the salesman's point of view, is that humans can't hear those sounds. Perfect! The other beauty is that they are cheap enough so that when the bugs don't hear those alleged sounds either and still crawl up the side of the kitchen counter looking for stray bits of ammunition from your salad shooter you don't seek a refund. You store it on the shelf with all those other purchases that if we were honest would bear the label "Burned Again" in bold letters. Another useless product foisted off on a gullible public, a success story as old as prostitution.

But what about all the wonderful things we are constantly being promised, the hybrid cars, for example? Well, what about them? The technology for hybrid cars has been around for decades. Anybody see endless lines of fuel efficient cars rolling off the assembly lines anywhere? As long as there's gold in them thar' hills, the ones with all that oil underneath them, hybrid technology will remain where it is, on the drawing board. So we might as well keep burning up all the oil we can until it's gone and then we'll be forced to come up with something else. Look what internal combustion replaced, horses, which, while a renewable resource, were not exactly the cleanest mode of transportation we could think of. At least cars don't crap in the street or attract flies. People forget the outbreaks of cholera and dysentery in those days, to say nothing of stepping ankle deep in a pile of warm horse exhaust.

Isn't this a retro approach? Hell, yeah. The problems we have can be solved, but not with anything anybody has come up with so far. Ask the marathon runners at the Beijing Olympics wearing surgical masks in a feeble attempt to counter the air pollution over there. If you could decree pollution away, well, the tiny minded gnomes that run the Chinese government are just the bunch of bozos to do so, but all their factory closings and traffic restrictions for the Olympics haven't made much of a dent in their thick and tasty air. The tides once again fail to heed our commands. The Chinese go everybody one better in the foul air department, burning more coal that Satan and emitting a similar stench.

So why the proposal of a moratorium on progress? Why, the oldest reason in the world: pure self-interest. Many of us can't keep up with all the horse exhaust being flung at us every day. It's too hard to separate the useful from the salad shooters. A couple of years of reflection might do our innovators some good, a little down time to clear their heads of frivolous notions. And maybe they can stop congratulating one another for thinking of using the power of the wind and water to meet our growing energy needs, two technologies as old as civilization. And many of us would like to see CD and DVD technology last longer than cassettes or VCR tapes did. As soon as we replaced our vinyl records and turntables the new technology was obsolete. There are only so many audio and video machines we are willing to master, or with which to at least reach some kind of uneasy truce. Introducing a new format now that we've all replaced our music collections yet again might cause mass rioting in the streets.

So scientists and tech people, take a breather for a while. You never did manage to deliver the galaxy-striding, robot assisted, disease-free future you once promised us. Stop inventing dubious devices and making up silly diseases to cure with expensive placebos, you're not fooling anyone anymore. Live with the fact that nobody give's rat's ass about all the computer updates you keep sending us. We dutifully download them and our computers are no different than they were before. The truth is we only download these "improvements" because they are free and they give you something to do with your lives. And nobody really believes there's such a thing as Adult Attention Deficit disorder. The fact that nobody's paying attention to the puny little man behind the curtain anymore means that people are finally coming to their senses and ignoring you. Deal with it, and find something else to do for a spell. Go fishing, take up a hobby, volunteer your time to the technologically handicapped, something, anything. Just don't hand us another little box with pretty glowing lights for the next couple of years so the rest of us can catch up. Ace from Phoenix is right. Enough already!