Jonathan Rowe – Page 23

Where’s Hoover?

The inkjet printer represents one of the worst business models ever devised. They sell the things for practically nothing. “What?” you think. “I can buy a printer for less than a hundred dollars?” Then you discover that the cartridges cost twenty-five to thirty dollars each, and that they wear out all the time, so that you’ll pay for the printer several times over within a year or two.

Not only that. They make a slightly different cartridge for each series of models, so that you can’t interchange them. If you had a stash left over from your old printer, too bad. They design them to be hard to refill — with most types you actually have to use a drill. If you do refill anyway, the cartridge won’t send the proper signal back to your computer, so the control mechanism gets thrown off.

Speak out for the World our Kids Will Live in

Frank Luntz, the Republican focus group wizard, says a magic phrase for Republicans is “for the children.” Talk about kids, and voters are with you.

So what do people who care about our habitat talk about? The “environment.” “Sustainability.” They talk about abstractions that have zero affective content for those who have not bought in already. The environment is the world we inhabit. Sustainability is about the world our kids will inhabit. Why can’t we talk about them that way?

Federated May, Starbucks Will

Boston was tired and a bit grimy when I was a child there in the ’50s. Even Fenway Park was just an old place where the Red Sox played, near the tire outlets and Sears Roebuck store. But then there was Christmas. You’d walk across the Commons in the biting cold, next to your father in his big overcoat. There were reindeer, crèches (butt out, ACLU) cheery Christmas music, a canopy of lights on the bare trees overhead.

You’d cross Tremont Street, and enter the shopping district where the department stores were. There were four or five of them back then: Jordan Marsh and Filenes of course, but also Raymond’s at the low end and, if memory serves, Gilchrist’s and R.H. Sterns at the high. The rest of the year the store windows had boring adult stuff. But at Christmas time they came alive. There were Santa’s workshops with mechanical elves. Little trains chugging merrily through snowy landscapes. All from Switzerland I believe, with loving attention to detail.There even was a real life St. Nick, who waved to us kids as we pushed and yammered for a look.

The ‘We’ in Social Security

It’s been just a month or two, but already it seems like 50. The focus-group maestros and message masseuses are out in force. (It’s personal accounts, not private accounts.) The megabuck ad campaigns are rolling into place. The folks who brought us the Swift Boat ads in the presidential campaign now are going to maul the American Association for Retired Persons, which has committed the crime of opposing the president’s plan.

I am talking of course about the Social Security debate, which quickly has become a dreary reprise of everything that has made big-time American politics such a numbing turnoff.

Quiet the Cell, Hush the Bus

I love tools. I stop at hardware stores sometimes just to look at them. The utter economy of a screwdriver and hammer feels almost cleansing in a society built upon diseconomy and waste.

Technology is another matter. Technology is what happens when the tool becomes the task, rather than just a means of doing the task. Usually it doesn’t so much solve problems as shift them around and create new ones. Cars, televisions, cell phones — we all could make a list.

Take and Take

I had this lawyer. Some big guys were suing me and I had this lawyer. The big guys, they used all the tricks. Shopped for a friendly forum. Pleaded hardship and poverty, even though some of them are rich as sheiks.

They won the first round, but no surprise there. We’d win on appeal I thought. I kept waiting for the lawyer to file. I was patient. The wheels of justice turn slowly, and all.

Tricycle Man

Which comes first, prosperity or virtue? Jack Kemp, then a vice-presidential candidate, argued in a debate with Al Gore that material wealth comes first. Enact “supply side” tax cuts, boost the churn of money through the economy, and virtue will follow as heat follows flame.

There actually is a lineage to this line of thought. It goes back to an American economist by the name of Simon Patten, who was prominent around the turn of the last century. Patten tried to reconcile the burgeoning consumer culture with the traditional values of probity, hard work and thrift. It was the old virtues, Patten said, that had to go. The new economy would usher in a new and finer form of humanity, with more discerning tastes and more philanthropic views.

Air Fare

Selling is your business, your reason for being. Then you discover that people are shopped out. They want to simplify their lives.

What do you do?

Lineage

Presidential inaugurations are the kind of scripted rituals that only a numbed-out media would take seriously. I’ve always wondered why the Washington Post and New York Times don’t assign their drama critics rather than their political reporters to cover them. They are pure theater, contrived entirely for the effect they will make. Why pretend that they are “news”?

The Bush affair yesterday did however have an unwitting candor. Not only was it scripted; it also was fenced. The peoples’ event in the peoples’ capital was accessible only to those who bought tickets — who were able to buy tickets. That meant, basically, Bush campaign supporters. Others were relegated to small crevices between the grandstands. This wasn’t just about security. It was about privitized democracy; and it was an emblem of an administration that wants to make everything private: the oceans, airwaves and forests; the research in our universities, the water that starts as rain and ends up in our taps .

Trucks

My son, who is a little over two, has an interest in trucks. Actually that’s like saying Tom DeLay, the House Republican Whip, has an interest in power. Josh is obsessed with trucks, consumed by the thought of them. He talks trucks when he wakes up in the morning and when he goes to bed at night. He plays with them, watches for them out the window, issues regular truck reports to his mother and myself. The arrival of the garbage truck on Tuesdays sends him into a frenzy. When we ask him if he has friends at playschool he says, “Trucks.”

If you ever have perused a picture book of trucks with a two-year-old hundreds of times over, and each time tried to think of something new to say about a dump truck and a front end loader, then you will understand why, one evening, I resorted to the Web. It was a lark, really. Josh was in my office, badgering me to read a truck book with him. I thought, “Hey, maybe we can see some new truck pictures on the Web.” I typed “truck pictures” on the Google bar, hit “go”, and found myself in one of those unlikely little worlds that flourish on the Web: truck picture aficionados.