Crank Up the Obsolescence

(First publish in the Bali Advertiser, March 24, 2010)

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done … Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new?"                 -- Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

My five-year-old son has taken to telling me I don’t know anything. This is probably something I signed up for when I became a father, but I didn’t think I would have to start dealing with that sort of an attitude from my oldest offspring until his teen years. Maybe it is just another sign of the digital age and the faster rate at which kids these days learn to throw things on the trash heap.

Sadly, though, I suspect he is right. The world bewilders me, and my mind has ceased to operate at the required speeds. Warp drive is needed but my brain -- like my first car, a 1955 turquoise and white Chevrolet Bel Air -- would rather pulse along at a comfortable fifty miles an hour.

Lest I get placed in the wrong generation, the car was 30 years old when I bought it and came off the assembly line six years before I was born. My own father was 25 when it was bolted together; my grandfathers were in their 50s. It was a solid car, with a long history of working man’s craft behind it, and few things can compare with the beautiful simplicity of its straight-six, 235-cubic-inch engine.

Now I am just old enough to have become the sort of crank who wishes everything was still less complicated and built to last decades. Moreover, I tend to distrust anyone near my age – say 10 years either way – that shows extreme digital drift. It’s not that I believe they can’t figure out how to program their multiple electronic toys or manipulate the images on a smart screen; it’s that I believe they don’t get any real joy out of it. I know from personal experience that our contemporaneous childhoods were grounded in three-speed column shifts and five-pound phone receivers that came in one color – black. Genetically, spiritually, those are the things that make our souls happy.

Perhaps it is natural as we get older that what we valued in our own youth comes to be viewed as valueless by the young, but it seems un-natural for we ourselves to get too excited about any of the “next new things” -- which seem to shine less brightly each year we advance. We’ve seen different versions of them all before, and it should take no effort at all to curb our enthusiasm.

Anyone from my generation knows deep in their heart of hearts that while mobile phones might have had the potential to be useful, they turned out to be just annoying and all too ubiquitous; that any car made after 1970 is just so much stylized plastic; that after five minutes with the buds of a Sony Walkman stuck in our ears -- or any other device that so closes us off from the world -- we should have handed it back.

The only three developments in the last 50 years that are actual improvements over what they replaced and have any vital use are the laptop computer -- only stop with all the bells and whistles and issue everyone an IBM ThinkPad state-of-the-art circa five years ago (black, of course) – those machines are like my old Royal manual typewriter – solid, durable, and with Windows XP, they wouldn’t need any design changes for at least 30 years; wireless broadband – instant online connection and communication for all, I’ll have more of that, please; and the digital camera – clearly better than old film loaders, both in performance and utilization of resources.

Take everything else that’s been added for the convenience, comfort and well-being of the human race over the 20th century, outside of most medical devices, and dump it all in the ocean – oh, no, wait, put it somewhere, not there, but stop making it, get rid of it, make something else out of it, space ships maybe, something that will tell future generations that we could actually do something noble and bold and useful with ourselves and weren’t so helpless that we needed gadgets and appliances to help us open a can, get from point A to point B, balance our checkbooks and clean the room.

We are lost in an age of devices that can pinpoint our location on the globe to within centimeters, all the while twiddling our thumbs on our BlackBerrys as the planet burns.

Now see the kind of crank I’ve become? Like my own dad, who didn’t know anything either, I’ve become the kind that rails at most things that came along after my third decade. What else would you expect?

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi