Dear Blog Reader
I hope that this finds you doing well and ensconced in blissful air conditioned environs. I am doing fine. I have not written for a while. It is all my fault. I am to blame. Look no further, the buck stops here.
I have three different ideas floating around in my head and none have crystallized into the blog topic du jour. I spent yesterday writing in my head while working in the garden; remembering each of the three ideas. I was weighing the pros and cons of each; cataloging each of their major points and then setting them aside. No one was proving to be a clear winner of an idea. I do not pretend that three non-winners will coalesce into the blog of the century. While mixing three blood lines will make a great dog, it will make a blog of hash. However, it is time to stop procrastinating, stop the dithering and put finger to keyboard and see what happens.
First, I just want to point out that Twitter is making once Shakespearean quality monkeys stupider and stupider. I feel for them. I had held out such great hope for monkeys everywhere. This hope was fueled in high school by Mrs. Gray. Old Lettie Gray as we slyly called her behind her back. However, it appears that she had the last laugh on us. She is still teaching 38 years after I graced her classroom. This causes a great conundrum for me. She had kids who graduated with me. So obviously, I have no idea how long she has taught or how long she will teach. I should probably find a current student and find out if they call her old energizer bunny Gray.
Mrs. Gray had a belief that high school kids should be exposed to issues surrounding death. The desirability of that exposure may or not have been true. It may or not be true today. It was a very effective use of literature to teach lessons about life and in this case death. I remember reading James Agee’s “A Death in the Family” and Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach.” I do not remember reading Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” until college. It has my favorite chapter in the world “My mother is a fish.” That’s it. The rest is blank space. Turn the page and on to less psychotic characters. I don’t know why we didn’t read As I Lay Dying in high school. Probably, because some in Pendleton, Indiana might have recognized certain family traits in the Bundren family tree or wreath as I like to joke with my Kentucky readers.
For what ever reason, we did not read Faulkner. Which is fine. I do remember “On the Beach” to this day. It was an apocalyptic story using the Russians as the vehicle for our destruction. The Russians were the only villains we knew in prehistoric times for you youngsters out there. No zombies for us. Our villains were real and had the intent of blowing us up. No fabricated dystopia for us.
In the book, it appears that the Northern Hemisphere had an itchy trigger finger and pushed the button. Russia and the United States did have enough nukes to destroy the world many times over or at least the upper half. Their work was successful and the superpowers destroyed one another. However, it appears that no one in the Southern Hemisphere had the bomb, so they were spared the gruesome millisecond vaporization that had kids of my generation hiding under desks during our bombing prep drills. “Put your head between you knees, your hands behind your head and kiss your a#### goodbye.”
No the Southern Hemisphere was spared and had to suffer the exquisite death of 200 pages of decent prose while coming to terms with their lives and death; thereby teaching future generations of high schoolers a little bit about their own mortality.
One of the devices in the book was an American Submarine that was stationed in the Sydney Harbor awaiting orders that would never come. While they were waiting for the lethal radiation cloud, they were scanning the airwaves for any possible communications from survivors. It is doubtful but everyone thinks that it could be possible. Maybe the President made it to the mountain bunker and was getting information out. Maybe only the private who made sure that the lights were on in the mountain bunker. Who knows but they were hopeful.
Then one day the Australians heard the distant tap of Morse Code coming through the radio waves. Although it was mostly gibberish, hope sprung eternal because one of the words that came through most often was “Help”. So the Americans loaded up their radiological suits, got into their submarine, and headed north. As they got closer to Seattle, the transmission’s origin, speculation rose to dizzying heights. One of the hypothesis was that someone with horrible Morse code skills was typing and doing a decent job at getting something close to help tapped out. Of course they didn’t have the skills to answer when the Australians tapped back “who are you and where are you at?” The coder knew just enough to code out help sporadically. Others thought that it was just random banging on the telegraph key. Who knows?
So Nevil spent a chapter having his characters argue back and forth. One of the arguments that has stuck with me through the years. In answering the hopeful arguments, the skeptics argued that the repetitive “helps” meant nothing. It was just random. In fact taking the argument further, they maintained that if you were to set an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of type writers (60 years ago you whippersnappers), one of them some day would type the complete works of William Shakespeare. Every time I hear that analogy I picture a giant room of Curious Georges sitting at type writers with one teacher looking over one of the monkey’s shoulder saying “No I am sorry it is “To be or not to be that is the question not what was the question again?” “You’ll just have to start over and please George, be careful this time?”
I find it striking that the measure of great communication 60 years ago was Shakespeare. Now it is 140 character tweets. What monkey couldn’t quote Beyoncé, the Kardashians or even the President if they only had to pound out 140 character’s in the proper order. Shoot! we even lower the bar by giving you credit for LOL, OMG and WTF. Don’t even get me started with emoticons. “Ah, is poor George feeling sad today?” “Well turn that frown upside down and put on a happy face.”
No wonder the cretins are coming out of the wood work and onto our phones, and iPads. Sooner or later they are going to say something that makes a little bit of sense, and we will all go rushing over to them and coo, “What a smart little monkey.”
Take care
Roger
