I Was Ranting About

By Pedro Hoffmeister

 

the school district brought in a tech-expert,
an Apple educator, a dynamic speaker, paid a lot
of money to come speak to us, started by
asking us to name our favorite technologies,
audience members calling out new
apps and video games I’d never heard of.

I yelled, “The toilet” because it is my favorite technology.
I love excrement not sitting in a chamber pot under my bed until
I walk over and dump it out the window onto the street below.
Or – to be more precise – composting toilets are a miracle of
science, the smell of sawdust (and sawdust only)
in a sun-warmed outhouse?

But this speaker wasn’t interested in useful
[or what he called “basic”] technologies. He didn’t
understand the truth that he is actually somewhere
in the middle of all history, and that in only 200 years
this current time-period we’re living in will look cute,
or quaint, and humans will tell stories about all
the stupid things people said or believed
at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Along with an anecdote about light-switches coming
to New York hotels in 1926 (wrong by 40 years)
this tech educator told us that Gutenberg invented
the printing press, as if the printing press and moveable type
were a Western thing first, as if printing presses
hadn’t already existed for almost 600 years in China,
but this expert had no idea that all of his claims were so
American,
so simplified and sadly incorrect.

As people say, we are a nation of anti-intellectualism,
and this man is a product, who – in turn – pushes products.
We don’t teach our children contextual learning because
it takes too much time. So, I imagine this speaker as a child,
staring at his TV in wonder. Is it too harsh to say that we
consume and consume and consume until we die?

But there were Hitler-like speech quotes too,
with the requisite yelling at the end:

“We have evolved beautifully!!!”

“We are living with human efficiency that has never been equaled!!!”

“Most futurians see this as a golden age of change!!!”

I did like that last slant-rhyme he included. It made me think of
all the poems that our revered speaker had never read.

He said he wanted us to “accept the truth, and not think about ethics,”
The Blue Pill, bask in the illusion, to close our eyes
and enter the common room of the cultural cult.

Instead, I think of the Navajo Eusabio in Willa Cather’s
Death Comes for the Arch Bishop, Eusabio speaking
in the late 19th century, when arrogant men also thought
they were at the cutting edge of history. The Navajo replies:
“Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”

Or I think of this – my favorite Arabic proverb:
“When danger approaches, sing to it.”

So here

am I,

singing.

 

After publishing books with Penguin, Simon & Schuster, and Random House (most recently the novel Too Shattered For Mending), Pedro Hoffmeister just self-published a collection of essays titled Confessions of the Last Man on Earth Without a Cell Phone, so he could say anything he wanted to say: Strong personal opinions, satire, and humor. Basically, resistance. He is now completing a collection of poems.

Photo credit: Liz West via a Creative Commons license.