Curse of the Cell Phone

Cell phones have ruined American society.

The present era has a whole different appearance from all previous ones. Everywhere you go today—and I do mean everywhere—you encounter people holding this little device to their ear and talking away, frequently walking about, discussing personal matters, oblivious to people around them, and usually talking loud.

I didn’t appreciate the society we had before the appearance of that irksome gadget, but now I look back on the pre-cell-phone era as a virtual golden age of good manners and civility. People were normal then. They talked only with other visible people, like themselves. The exception was when they were in their home or office talking on a landline telephone, and that too was normal.

In recent centuries, human life has been transformed by the automobile, the airplane, the computer, and other inventions, but I believe the cell phone leads the way in being the most intrusive device to appear. It has invaded the very soul of America. You just can't get away from the bloody thing, or the atrocious manners it seems to engender.

Recently I made my monthly visit to a small barbershop, where I witnessed something that wouldn’t have been believed a few years ago. I noticed that one barber had white hair and a white beard and so did his customer. About halfway through the haircut, the customer accepted a cell-phone call and started yaking away. The barber, unable to continue cutting the man’s hair, was forced to pace back and forth across the shop for 15 minutes till the conversation ended.

The cell phone has become the new deity: The God That Must Be Obeyed. I don’t care if your mother is being chased by wild dogs. You must answer that jingling cell phone. And don’t be in a rush to hang up, either. Your mother will survive—with lots of stitches. Furthermore, you may be rewarded by being wafted away into another world via that phone. Recently in a supermarket I heard loud laughter and looking toward the sound, saw a well-dressed young woman in a checkout lane. She was alternately talking and laughing into her cell phone, and her volume was increasing. The cashier was finishing up scanning her groceries and there were people all around, but the young woman was drifting onto another plane of existence.

Whatever she was hearing on that cell phone reached new heights of hilarity and she started JUMPING UP AND DOWN, three or four inches off the floor, and shrieking with laughter. People were staring at her, but she was oblivious to them and her surroundings. I wonder if she realized later what an appalling spectacle she had made of herself.

According to a national survey ,a majority of American adults (30%) say the cell phone is the invention they hate the most—but can't live without. The cell phone beat out the alarm clock (25%) and television (23%). The survey measures Americans’ attitudes toward invention. Merton Flemings, survey director, said that although cell phones have “clearly been beneficial,” the benefits of an invention “sometimes come with a societal cost.”

I suppose that’s what they call that young woman jumping up and down and screaming in a supermarket: a “societal cost.” Not to mention the customer who interrupted a haircut for 15 minutes to chat on his cell.

I think the main force responsible for the success of the cell phone is a human weakness: the dread of being alone. Some people need to be connected to other people all the time. Years ago I worked with a woman named Carol who told me that she wished she never had to be alone for as much as two seconds of her life. She said she would take somebody to the bathroom with her if she could.

It’s hard for me to understand such an attitude. I enjoy being with people some of the time, but I also like being alone, and silent, and I marvel at those men and women I see chattering away on cell phones as they shop in stores, drive cars, and even walk their dogs. Yak yak yak yak yak. The cell phone has given new life and acceptance to loquacity. It hasn’t been that hard on garrulity either.

I know that the need to connect isn’t the only lure of cell phones and I don’t doubt that business and other matters are discussed on them. But a majority of the conversations I have listened to (against my will) have consisted of chatting or an earnest discussion of personal problems that should not be discussed within earshot of a stranger. And I think the need to do that is what primarily drives the cell-phone industry.

Some pretty cool research into cell-phone use has been going on and you can read here about researchers who discovered that hearing one half of a conversation is more annoying than hearing two people converse normally.

Cell phones provide voice mail, giving the owner the option of ignoring the ring if circumstances are inappropriate for starting a conversation. Yet not once have I seen a cell-phone user let the voice mail pick up. They always take the call, no matter how many other people may be inconvenienced or annoyed.

Once in a while I have noticed a well-mannered person accept a call, then hurriedly walk away to a location where they can speak in private. But these polite folks are in a small minority. Most cell-phone freaks think nothing of carrying on a lengthy conversation even while they are in a movie theater.

A lot of people complain about cell-phone annoyances, but I haven't noticed anybody viewing this phenomenon as I do: a historic shift in the manners and mores of our society. The cell phone has produced a tacky new world that we never expected, and now can never be free of.

Before dawn on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded in a test near Alamogordo, New Mexico. First came the colossal blast, then the yellow fireball, and finally the now well-known mushroom cloud rising 7.5 miles into the sky. At that moment a line was crossed. Everything had changed, a new world had come into being, the Nuclear Age, and the old world was gone forever.

Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, test director, watching the awesome spectacle from a distance with other scientists and military men, said grimly, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.”

Another line was crossed on April 3, 1973, when Martin Cooper, inventor of the cell phone, made the first call on the new device.

I was wondering if Cooper called himself a son-of-a-bitch for inventing the cell phone, but he didn’t. He was quite happy and buoyant about it, and to give him credit, it was an admirable achievement from a strictly scientific viewpoint.

“As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call,” said Cooper, who was with Motorola when he invented the cell phone and is now chairman and CEO of ArrayComm Inc. “Remember that in 1973, there weren't cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones.”

The phone that Cooper wowed New Yorkers with that day was a big, clunky thing weighing almost two pounds and costing several thousand dollars. It took many years for it to evolve into the sleek little inexpensive device in use today.

“People want to talk to other people—not a house, or an office, or a car,” Cooper said. “Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire. It is that freedom we sought to vividly demonstrate in 1973.”

Cooper got that right. People certainly do “demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are,” and with a vengeance. And though we complain about cell phones, we have to have them—don’t we?—because they make us safe. We can call for help when we're in trouble and no landline phones are available.

But wait—it turns out it’s not as simple as all that—there are lots of problems with emergency calls using a cell phone.

As this 2008 article explains,“If you call for help from a cell phone, dispatch centers can't guarantee they'll find you fast, or find you at all.” So we don’t even have guaranteed security to compensate us for the breakdown of manners and the endless babble of alien voices.

I am not equating the cell phone with the atomic bomb, and I am certainly not calling Martin Cooper a son of a bitch. What I am doing is equating one line with another line—call them lines of destiny—which once crossed, there is no going back to what existed before. You can’t get the toothpaste back into the tube or the genii back into the magic lantern. The nuclear bomb, offspring of the atomic variety, hangs over us still and the cell phone proliferates, even as we watch—and try not to listen.

Iran Wants a Nuclear Bomb? No Problem

I have a solution to the current problem involving Iran that is so simple and beautiful I’m surprised nobody else has thought of it: Let’s give Iran a nuclear bomb. I’m talking about the United States. Let’s give the mothers, I mean the mullahs, the bomb. I’m serious. Talk about easing tensions. Tensions would get so eased everybody would go to sleep.

As everybody knows, the Iranian scientists have been "enriching uranium," which is considered naughty. Only about three people in the world know what that means, but everybody else takes their word for it. As I understand it, enriching uranium is necessary for certain processes involving the peaceful use of nuclear power. It's also necessary for building a bomb, but that takes several years. The Iranians say they are only pursuing the first, peaceful option.

Under terms of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed, a nation is within its rights to carry out this process. Yet the United States has decided that Iran will not be allowed to do it anyway and President George "God told me to invade Iraq" Bush has threatened to attack the country if it doesn’t knuckle under.

Even when 16 U.S. intelligence agencies went public in late 2007 with their findings that Iran had ended its nuclear-weapons program in 2003, Bush said he didn’t care. He wanted to know why those sneaky Iranians had ever had a nuclear-weapons program. He didn’t mention the fact that America has been operating a nuclear-weapons program since 1944 that didn’t end in 2003.

What is so all-fired horrible about Iran possessing one nuclear weapon? For comparison, let's do a little roundup of the nuclear weapons possessed by countries around the planet.

• Pakistan 15-25?
• India 60+?
• United Kingdom 185
• Israel 200+?
• China 410
• France 464
• Russia 10,000
• United States 10,500

Now, if my pocket calculator is working properly, that adds up to an estimated total of 21,844 apocalyptic bombs in the world, and nobody cares. Yet if it seems that the Iranians may be thinking of possibly building one teensy weensy nuclear bomb somewhere down the road, Condi Rice gets her panties in a wad and demands that “the world community" do something. How dare those Iranians think of developing a nuclear weapon? Who do they think they are?

Hillary Clinton, who is running for the presidency of Israel, has had to stop wearing panties because of the wadding problem.

"Let’s be clear about the threat we face now,” she lectured. “A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel, to its neighbors and beyond…. We cannot and should not—must not—permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons.”

Some people on the front row at that speech said they could hear a faint crinkling sound coming from Hillary's skirt, apparently the panties wadding up underneath. (This was before she stopped wearing them.) I can't imagine silk making a crinkling or other sound, but look—ask the people who sat on the front row.

Anyway, was Hillary being fair? The United States has well over 10,000 nuclear weapons. Would she really begrudge Iran one little bomb to call its own?

The hypocrisy of this situation is sending forth a nauseous gas that may be more deadly than nuclear fallout. At any event, it smells worse.

Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has had the impertinence to suggest that America and Russia give up their nuclear arsenals. The nerve of that man!

Now, I know I may come across as naïve here, seemingly calling for fairness—i.e., if so many other nations have nuclear bombs, it’s only fair to let Iran have them—but I’m not. I am well aware that fairness is an unknown concept in international relations, where the operative word is spelled p-o-w-e-r. Those that have enough of it can, and almost certainly will, do whatever they please, and those that lack it are sooner or later going to get screwed to the wall.

I just don’t want any more wars. I've seen too many ghastly pictures from the one going on now in Iraq. Furthermore, the United States is bankrupt and so far gone into debt it will never see daylight again. This country can't afford another war. This country can't afford peace.

So here's my plan. We agree to make a present of one of our newest, shiniest nuclear bombs to Iran. (That will leave us only 10,499, but we'll just have to scrape by with those as best we can.) In return, Iran will have to agree to stop all enriching of uranium or doing anything else that might lead to the production of a nuclear weapon.

The Iranians will be grateful to the United States for enabling them to stop sneaking around doing whatever they've been doing in those subterranean chambers, spending tons of money, and being publicly fussed at and threatened by Condi and Hillary and everybody else. And they can now hold their heads high because they will be members in good standing of the Nuclear Club. (Everything will be done in secret so the world will never know that Iran's bomb came from the U.S.)

The Iranian scientists will be especially grateful because they will be able to stop doing all that dreary work they've been doing. I mean, how would you like to spend the next seven or eight years in a dungeon-like facility underground "enriching uranium"? Well, the Iranian scientists wouldn't like it either. They would rather spend that time outdoors playing golf, which is especially fun and challenging in Iran because the whole country is a sand trap.

By our generous move, we could usher in a whole new Era of Good Feelings for the world.

I say give 'em the bomb. It's the only way to go.

The Power of Ideas I love original ideas, if they are intelligent and useful. They have a unique power in the world to make things happen. Not long ago, I ran across an intriguing idea while reading a volume entitled The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. The book covers a lot of ground and my purpose isn't to review it. But in Chapter 14 the author tells about a remarkable man named Seymour Papert, computer scientist, teacher and writer who had a great interest in how children learn. He believed a child should start with a subject of interest and then follow wherever it led, rather than being confined to rigid subject-matter classifications. (My apologies to Papert for this thumbnail explanation.)Under the subhead 'The Unity of Knowledge,' Talbott says: "The pursuit of a single interest, if allowed to ramify naturally, can lead to all knowledge. Papert cites his own adult experience with the study of flowers, which led him to Latin, folk-medicine, geography, history, art, the Renaissance, and, of course, botany."Now, there is a powerful idea: The pursuit of a single interest can lead to all knowledge. Reading about this idea brought up the memory of how I had mastered English: simply by learning how to use commas. One summer, decades ago, after my freshman year at college, I settled down with the McMillan Handbook of English to master commas—that was all.I had done some decent writing that first year, earning a “B” and an “A” in the two semesters of English, but I stumbled over commas. I really didn’t know how to use them. Since I wanted to be a writer, I knew I had to learn. And I did. In studying the handbook section on commas, I came to understand why certain clauses, phrases and words were set off by commas, and why others weren’t. In learning how to use commas, I mastered a much bigger subject: language itself. Of course I didn’t exhaust an inexhaustible subject, which English is.But from a practical standpoint, I saw for the first time how the language was put together, how it worked. There were all those introductory phrases and nonrestrictive clauses and parenthetical elements, and I had to understand them because their flow was largely controlled by commas. As I studied the "rules" of using commas, language opened itself to me and I could see its orderly inner workings.My study had unity. It was confined to commas—and I did learn how to use them—yet I learned so much more by necessity. Suppose I had settled down that summer to “learn English.” I wouldn’t have known where to begin—the subject is too vast—and I probably would have lost interest and learned little. I succeeded through the unity of my effort. Of course at the time I had no thought of unity and mastering English and all that. I just wanted to become skillful with commas. It was only those many years later, reading Talbott's book, that I gained an insight into what I had done without realizing it. (No credit to me, I was just groping along.) Of course, as the years went by, I never stopped learning new things about the magnificent English language.But think of it: The study of one subject can lead to all knowledge. My study of commas, of course, didn’t lead to all knowledge, but it did result in an understanding of an immense subject—a completely unexpected (and unsought) outcome. So, based on my experience with commas, perhaps we can say:The mastery of a small but essential part of a big subject can result in gaining insight into the whole subject. If this is true, what an economy of effort it makes available to us. And I think it could be applied to almost any field of study.

I love original ideas, if they are intelligent and useful. They have a unique power in the world to make things happen.

Not long ago, I ran across an intriguing idea while reading a volume entitled The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. The book covers a lot of ground and my purpose isn't to review it. But in Chapter 14 the author tells about a remarkable man named Seymour Papert, computer scientist, teacher and writer who had a great interest in how children learn. He believed a child should start with a subject of interest and then follow wherever it led, rather than being confined to rigid subject-matter classifications. (My apologies to Papert for this thumbnail explanation.)

Under the subhead 'The Unity of Knowledge,' Talbott says: "The pursuit of a single interest, if allowed to ramify naturally, can lead to all knowledge. Papert cites his own adult experience with the study of flowers, which led him to Latin, folk-medicine, geography, history, art, the Renaissance, and, of course, botany."

Now, there is a powerful idea: The pursuit of a single interest can lead to all knowledge.

Reading about this idea brought up the memory of how I had mastered English: simply by learning how to use commas. One summer, decades ago, after my freshman year at college, I settled down with the McMillan Handbook of English to master commas—that was all.

I had done some decent writing that first year, earning a “B” and an “A” in the two semesters of English, but I stumbled over commas. I really didn’t know how to use them. Since I wanted to be a writer, I knew I had to learn. And I did.

In studying the handbook section on commas, I came to understand why certain clauses, phrases and words were set off by commas, and why others weren’t. In learning how to use commas, I mastered a much bigger subject: language itself. Of course I didn’t exhaust an inexhaustible subject, which English is.

But from a practical standpoint, I saw for the first time how the language was put together, how it worked. There were all those introductory phrases and nonrestrictive clauses and parenthetical elements, and I had to understand them because their flow was largely controlled by commas.

As I studied the "rules" of using commas, language opened itself to me and I could see its orderly inner workings.

My study had unity. It was confined to commas—and I did learn how to use them—yet I learned so much more by necessity. Suppose I had settled down that summer to “learn English.” I wouldn’t have known where to begin—the subject is too vast—and I probably would have lost interest and learned little. I succeeded through the unity of my effort.

Of course at the time I had no thought of unity and mastering English and all that. I just wanted to become skillful with commas. It was only those many years later, reading Talbott's book, that I gained an insight into what I had done without realizing it. (No credit to me, I was just groping along.) Of course, as the years went by, I never stopped learning new things about the magnificent English language.

But think of it: The study of one subject can lead to all knowledge. My study of commas, of course, didn’t lead to all knowledge, but it did result in an understanding of an immense subject—a completely unexpected (and unsought) outcome. So, based on my experience with commas, perhaps we can say:

The mastery of a small but essential part of a big subject can result in gaining insight into the whole subject.

If this is true, what an economy of effort it makes available to us. And I think it could be applied to almost any field of study.

The Doom of Whom

“Whom are you?” he said, for he had been to night school.—Saki

Whom is an honorable old word that has been in the English language since its beginnings. It is also a worn-out old word that is begging to be retired. I think we should accommodate it. Of course we have pretty much retired it from spoken American English. Now we need to expunge it from the written language, where some old-fashioned diehards are propping it up, feeding it intravenously, and keeping it tottering along.

It’s probably impossible to say why, but somewhere along the years we stopped needing whom. We found that who has no trouble doing double duty serving as both the nominative and the objective case, and we Americans use who in both cases all day long in conversation.

They may do it differently in other parts of the English-speaking world, but in the United States people almost never use whom in speaking. Once in a long while you hear it, usually in a speech rather than in conversation, and whenever you do, it sounds stilted. The speaker seems to be putting on airs or striving awkwardly to be “correct.”

Whom sticks out—it is no longer a natural word in spoken American English. Its use is still pretty widespread in the written language, but even there, I’m glad to say, more and more good writers are using who exclusively. Here are some examples from the Internet of who being used in the objective case. Notice also that the first three examples end superbly with prepositions (a separate matter I will take up in another essay).

“Do you know who you're talking to?”—Thomas L. Friedman, AC, 10/5/00

“…nobody was exactly sure who we were at war with.”—Sam Francis, Web

“Remember who you are dealing with.”—Carol A. Valentine, email newsletter

“We know precisely who is hoaxing who, and we are hardly going to be quelled by such a fatuous and pathetic attempt at a reply.”—Diane Harvey, Web

[Incidentally, I had not yet learned how to do HTML when writing this piece, so I didn’t collect the links for these examples and can’t provide them now.]

The next example is beautiful. Under the system that is dying, it would contain five ugly whom’s. Instead, it has 10 triumphant in-your-face who’s.

“The emotional and territorial issues – that are the result of sexual relationships – of men and women being guarded and jealous concerning who is sleeping with who, who belongs to who, who is ‘looking’ at who, who is flirting with who, who is wearing what in front of who, etc.” –Karen De Coster, on lewrockwell.com

The reader who is offended and even shocked by the idea of using who in both the nominative and objective cases should be aware that language is a living thing. As the years go by, it changes. Word meanings shift. New words enter the language and old ones drop out.

For example, we used to think we needed two words to indicate “at this place” and “to this place.” We said, “I am here,” but, “Come hither.” As time went by, for reasons that probably nobody could explain, we began to use “here” for both “at this place” and “to this place.” “Hither” withered and gradually dropped out of the language. The same thing happened with “there and “thither” and “where” and “whither.”

And it is now happening with who and whom. One word is doing the work of two. As I said, whom is already gone from spoken American, making only an awkward appearance at long intervals, like a relative who shows up at a family reunion wearing last year’s fashions. Consider the following:

“In my study of the neoconservatives, it was easy to find out whom in Washington they liked and whom they didn’t. To find out whom they didn’t like, no research was required.”—Karen Kwiatkowski

Notice how each whom brings you up short. You don’t expect it because you never hear it in conversation. It’s almost like a word from a foreign language inserted into English. At least Kwiatkowsky used her whom’s correctly

I say that because one of the problems with whom is that even good writers often have surprising difficulty figuring out how to use it. They use whom when it should be who even under the present fading system. The same is true of whomever, which is in the same category as whom. The following examples are from articles posted on the Internet. In each case, who or whoever should have been used.


“…spiteful neighbors, employees, former spouses, whomever will gain the power to report any disliked person.”—Paul Craig Roberts, Web

“His mother, Irma, said her son took the rap for high-ranking officers, whom she said were ‘all guilty.’ ”—CNN on the Web

“Meanwhile, back home, voters and reporters should be asking both Bush and Kerry much more specific questions about the draft and its possible return during the term of the next president, whomever that may be.”—Dave Lindorff, Web

“Why should we care whom we were, when the future is rolling down the tracks straight at us and this wild ride will just keep getting better.”—Michael Peirce, lewrockwell.com

“All of this has contributed to a Bush bubble, and political commentators are once again diminishing the chances of the Democratic presidential nominee, whomever it will be.”—David Corn, Web

“Whomever made those investments almost certainly had at least some foreknowledge of the 9/11 catastrophe.”—Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com

“…I do believe that more Americans could tell me whom the finalists are….”—John Troyer, CounterPunch

I have a lot more examples of this kind of thing, but I’ll stop here. The point is made that under the present system even top-quality writers are unable to figure out whether to use the nominative or the objective. Whom and whomever served us well for centuries, but their place in history is rapidly coming to an end. Let’s cut them loose and let them fade into the past, where they belong. And let’s don’t be timid and apologetic about it. Let’s come right out and boldly use who and whoever exclusively.