My cell phone store is less than a block from the church where my parents were buried, in 1958 and 1961 respectively. As I was looking at the graves and the house my father built in memory of my mother for the church, I thought abut the cell phone on my belt.
As I walked out of the store with the cell phone on my belt, I remembered very well when my parents and I saw a real technological advance in personal communication: WE went from an eight-party line to a private line.
I remember that we couldn’t use the phone if any of the other seven parties were on the line. I remember that, in order to call anyone ELSE on the party line, and everyone else was at least a mile away, you dialed 1191and hung up the phone. It rang for all seven others and you waited until the ringing stopped and got on the line and you might have four different people who had answered. You talked to the one you were calling and the others hung up.
So the private line was quite an advance.
In a huge house there would be ONE telephone, as you can see in all the old movies. A separate phone meant a separate line, and that was an extravagance even the rich didn’t consider worth having.
I then went by the church to check on the graves and look at the building my father built in memory of my mother, which is now the Boy Scout meeting place. It looks better and will last longer than the ten-year old new church building and will be fifty years old next year. But the brick and the brick work is, needless to say, the best there is.
As for the graves, I had stood in the same spot for two funerals in a time I remember so well and that everyone else has forgotten. Practically nothing that people said in 1959 and 1961 is remembered today. But practically everything that we take for granted today is based on that FORGOTTEN thinking.
But for now let’s stick with the contrast between my cell phone and the modern 1950s miracle of private lines out in Pontiac, SC.
I was just watching a modern version of the old scifi show “The Outer Limits” on the Sci-Fi Channel This 1980s version still has, “We are in control of your television set. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical.”
I have a disk of “The Simpson’s Halloween Special” that has the same take-off with the same words in one episode, “Do not adjust your television….We control the vertical. We control the Horizontal.”
The obvious question to anyone born after 1960 would, “What the HELL is the horizontal and the vertical?” People know abut THAT, but they don’t remember any of the thinking of that same period.
Do you remember that the old “Police Squad” movies starring Leslie Nielsen had OJ Simpson as his sidekick Nordberg? When it was on television about 1980, “Police Squad” had, as a joke, the words, “Police Squad — IN COLOR!” A quarter century after my parents were buried this was still familiar enough to be joke, since by then all shows had long since been in color. But neither of my parents ever saw a color TV show.
When my parents were buried, you could not take your driver’s license exam in a car that had an automatic shift. You had to bring a car that had the “real” three forward gears on the steering wheel.
Eight years before my parents died, you could not drive anywhere without knowing exactly where Charlotte, North Carolina was. It had the only television station anyone could get from Columbia until after 1950 and you had to have a tower on top of your house to get it. On top of everything from mansions to shacks there was a metal tower aimed straight at Charlotte.
About the time our eight-party line became private all three networks set up stations in Columbia.
In 1953 I acquired my first amateur radio license. I had a hundred-foot wire antenna stretched and I could, using Morse Code, converse with other people, all by myself, in Tennessee and North Carolina with ease. But that took LOTS of work to get a special license and you built the station yourself. But at that time, I was one of the few people in my area who knew ham radio existed, much less having a license.
Today I am one of less than half a dozen people in South Carolina who has an Alcor bracelet on my am to be frozen at death. The idea of being “brought back” today from freezing is less absurd than a heart transplant when I buried my father, who died of a heart attack that would make him an outpatient today.
The idea of a WhitakerOnline where I cannot tell what CONTINENT a person is writing contrasts with my very advanced hundred-foot antenna.
So Whitaker Online is written in terms of a century when a modular man will be routine, a human being who will simply replace ANYTHING that wears out.
I remember that, into the middle 1950s, my father would sometimes say to me, “Bobby, go over to the Rosses and tell them …” and my mother would always remind him, “Whit, we have a PHONE for that.”
The Rosses lived exactly 1.1 miles away.
My parents are buried at that Methodist Church because that was their community. It was and had been for a thousand years the only place where adults CAME TOGETHER every week for anything but work.
I will not be buried. I come together with those who share my beliefs DAILY. And this is just the beginning.
If you think you can conduct politics or religion or anything else the same way now as you did then, maybe you need a long rest.
#1 by Tim on 06/27/2007 - 6:43 pm
I was starting to think this was one of THOSE entries. The one were we get told the equivalent of ‘Bob had to walk ten miles in the snow to get to school and you young’ns are lucky’ etc. Then after all that reading I get to the meat of the matter.
“If you think you can conduct politics or religion or anything else the same way now as you did then, maybe you need a long rest.”
Ok BW, you could have said that a 100 words into it. Of course, technology is giving us (your ideas) power and that is what counts most—–not the other 900 words. But I am happy to have your 900+ words without having to walk a mile to yap or read them!
But now that we are starting to own the internet. They are trying their hardest outlaw it by any means necessary. It is funny they say they are all for free speach on the internet….but we all know they envy and want Chinese style internet laws here in America. The only thing George Bush gets right is that “freedom works”. Famous last words for the modern equivalent of a Whig party member.
I did not know you liked the Simpsons. The Simpson’s Holiday specials are great. Especially, the Holloween show were they are Quoting the Raven by Poe.
#2 by Dave on 06/27/2007 - 7:21 pm
Yes, yes. How people are ignorant of the true sweep of time. Who realizes that the Civil War picture of the young kid in uniform, mired in 18th century issues, not even 19th century issues, could (and some did) live long enough to be cruising down the highway in an automatic transmission vehicle listening to “Old Timey” on the radio?
Yet buffoons out there cannot yet contemplate the obsolescence of a Congress and other political forms of expression and settlement that were designed to mitigate the evils of 17th century rural isolation and its associated forms of feudal oppression, paving the way for the industrial and commercial society to come.
Yet the buffoons still want to get out for mass marches and protests, like the civil rights and anti-war buffoonery of the 50s and 60s, not realizing that those forms of political expression were completely obsolete by 1900, let alone 2007.
Samizdat, that’s what it is all about today.
Someday the Secret Service, or whatever, is going to seize by the throat that goddamn crime racketeering organization that calls itself Congress, and put an end to its masquerade as a governance body and the American people will not skip a beat, simply sighing in relief that it is about time.
And political competition and societal governance will proceed through samizdat with its highly balkanized and exclusive clubs in a hierarchy of whoever has it most operationally and tactically right, and no one will think anything about it, the whole thing proceeding more calmly and more orderly than anyone could have possibility imagined.
The Jews will have long since ceased paying for having their slant on the world appear “on page 1”, realizing the irrelevancy of their expenditures.
#3 by Al Parker on 06/27/2007 - 11:29 pm
Since Bob shared a personal story it might grant me the right to respond with a personal question:
You seem to have a desire to achieve immortality. Are you trying to live forever through the survival of your race?
#4 by Tim Martin on 06/27/2007 - 11:57 pm
My father was the LAST guy on our block to break down and buy a color television. It was delivered the first week of August 1962, which i remember clearly only because the first night we sat down to watch it we saw the news footage of the burial of Marilyn Monroe. There was a riot of sorts and the cemetery was trampled. And to make it worse, the film was black and white-but the news anchor was color.
I dismantled that set well over a decade later when it was replaced by the old Works-In-A-Drawer QUASAR sets made in Quincy, Illinois. My older sister worked on the line there to supplant her modest income as a Dutch-trained lay midwife delivering babies mostly for the Amish. Doctors wouldn’t do home births after about ’68 for fear they’d be delicensed if a baby died, and the Amish were insistent that the women birth at home. Anyway, the power transformer out of that old set powered a 100 watt, full plate modulated AM “10 meter” transmitter that actually never worked a legal ham. I used it for CBing and later turned it into a linear for SSB use and finally used it to power a KWM-2.
Mother M sold the plant to Matsushita (Panasonic) who swore they would keep it open forever. Forever lasted about four months. We knew there and then who REALLY won World War Two. My sister went to pharmacy school on Motorola’s tab, and my father bought one of the first Amiga computers and taught himself computer programming, at first using the Quasar as a monitor. He’s 83 now and he writes C++ programs for Linux and Emacs Lisp code. He had to quit flying a couple of years ago but still drives his Corvair every day. We are very proud of him. My mother passed on a couple of years ago, but they’d been divorced for a decade.
#5 by AFKAN on 06/28/2007 - 12:21 am
in reply to Dave:
You made several points that are stronger than they might seem. I’d like to address some of them.
you wrote:
Dave says:
Yes, yes. How people are ignorant of the true sweep of time. Who realizes that the Civil War picture of the young kid in uniform, mired in 18th century issues, not even 19th century issues, could (and some did) live long enough to be cruising down the highway in an automatic transmission vehicle listening to “Old Timey” on the radio?
Yet buffoons out there cannot yet contemplate the obsolescence of a Congress and other political forms of expression and settlement that were designed to mitigate the evils of 17th century rural isolation and its associated forms of feudal oppression, paving the way for the industrial and commercial society to come.
Yet the buffoons still want to get out for mass marches and protests, like the civil rights and anti-war buffoonery of the 50s and 60s, not realizing that those forms of political expression were completely obsolete by 1900, let alone 2007.
in reply:
Yet, the “civil rights marches” and “anti-war marches” – which were actually anti-DRAFT marches – provided useful theater to set the stage for a people who BELIEVE in television, in general, and television NEWS, in particular.
Now, nobody believes in television “news” at all; access to the Internet has disintermediated an entire class of Gatekeepers.
The leaders of them, by the way, want Google and Craigslist to subsidize them in their dotage, which grants, and scholarships, and endowed chairs…
The Age of Discontinuity is well upon us…
you wrote:
Samizdat, that’s what it is all about today.
Someday the Secret Service, or whatever, is going to seize by the throat that goddamn crime racketeering organization that calls itself Congress, and put an end to its masquerade as a governance body and the American people will not skip a beat, simply sighing in relief that it is about time.
in reply:
A stronger argument than you imagined.
One, the Winter 92-92 issue of “PARAMETERS,” allowed a fascinating article – “fiction,” of course, but even so, given the topic – written by Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., entitled “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012.”
His credentials cite at the end of the article begin with this:
“Lieutenant Colonel Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., USAF, is the Deputy Staff Judge Advocate, US Central Command, at MacDill AFB, Florida.”
His credentials cite ends with this:
“The present article is adapted from his National War College student paper that was co-winner of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1991-92 Strategy Essay Competition, in which students from all the senior service colleges compete.”
Well, if you want “strategic thinking,” and 2012 is not too far from now…
Now, realize that the Republic of Aztlan would offer an ideal opportunity for recognition by a successor to Putin, as a way of paying us back for “Kosovo.”
And, recognize that Blackwater offers “brigade sized” forces to state and local governments, as needed…
Two, the late Peter Drucker, who was more strongly acquainted with the ideas, ideology, and plans of the corporate/financial Elite than most can imagine, said the day was coming when the Federal government would be used solely to take in money, and disburse it in the functional equivalent of block grants…
I see a Pattern here…
you wrote:
And political competition and societal governance will proceed through samizdat with its highly balkanized and exclusive clubs in a hierarchy of whoever has it most operationally and tactically right, and no one will think anything about it, the whole thing proceeding more calmly and more orderly than anyone could have possibility imagined.
in reply:
Look at the transformation of Russia from the “Soviet Union,” a collection of “republics” that it could not afford to own, or administer, with various different races and “ethnicities” (the hallmark of Empire) fighting over a smaller economic order, to its transformation into the centerpiece of the “Russian Federation,” with the New Russia based on RACIAL homogeneity, and aligned from the Baltics to the Ukraine – all WHITE people – looking to their cultural community with Europe, and the West…
Now, what might something like that look like on THIS continent?
Hint: “Northwest Republic,” by Harold Covington, and its Federation of like-minded (and like-looking!) people, across the northern tier of America.
The fundamental organizing principle of New Russia, and the next successful transition of the next America?
RACE! First, Foremost, Forever, the Family as the microcosm of the RACE, and the RACE as the macrocosm of the Family.
you wrote:
The Jews will have long since ceased paying for having their slant on the world appear “on page 1”, realizing the irrelevancy of their expenditures.
in reply:
What will they do with those expenditures instead?
Hope that another General Grant does not return to power, and exercise another General Order No. 11?
#6 by shari on 06/28/2007 - 7:57 am
As for the goddamn crime racketeering congress, I wonder if the ammnesty effort won’t be the final straw. Not only is it a very public slap in the face for “taxpayers” I don’t believe that illegals really care. They have no reason to want to become American “taxpayers” now do they?
Speaking of taxes, we are now without health insurance. Blue cross raised our “essential care” plan $230 a month after hiking it over $100 last year. They haven’t paid out a cent since our kids are grown. We can no longer afford it. We can’t pay for this “best system in the world” and certainly aren’t alone.
Congress can no longer pretend it’s helping and the “president” can no longer pretend he’s “protecting Americans” right now.
#7 by Richard on 06/28/2007 - 8:35 am
Here I thought that Ted Kennedy and John McCain were the supreme achievements of the American Political Legacy.
But the courts rule now. By default.
And rule by default does not last forever.
I read that somewhere.
#8 by Bob on 06/28/2007 - 8:44 am
Tim, I think the examples I gave were useful.
#9 by Bob on 06/28/2007 - 8:49 am
Your question is whether I have a survival instinct.
Yes.
#10 by shari on 06/28/2007 - 10:21 am
No one gets tired of living. It’s dying that we get tired of.
#11 by richard on 06/28/2007 - 10:56 am
Hey, who’s this new ‘Richard’ on the block? There’s only room for one round here, pal!
#12 by Hardric on 06/30/2007 - 6:38 am
Ah, I have stepped on the unique naming convention. My faux pas. I should have looked at more recent name selections before jumping in. Nevertheless, this was by no means a brazen attempt at identity theft. 🙂
I thus shall resort to a permutation, which worked out better than a simple Caesar cipher.
Onward.