Friday, April 12, 2002

What Is Perfection?

What is perfection? For some it’s watching Michael Jordan sink another impossible shot. For others it’s looking at a new-born baby--their own of course. In fact, for Whittaker Chambers of cold war era fame, it was the perfection of his young daughter’s ear that made him renounce his communist past. Something that perfect, he later wrote, could only have been made by God. (I bet Alger Hiss, the suspected communist spy, indicted by Chambers, and tracked down by then-Congressman Richard Nixon, wished that Chambers had never had kids). Anyway, perfection for me can be summed up by two phrases “home-home up” and home-home down.” Need another hint? How about “F10” for saving or “Alt-F4” for blocking a sentence or two. Yes, my perfection may be a bit more mundane than others, but simply because it is a computer program, WordPerfect 5.1 to be exact, is no reason to stint in singing its praises. Unfortunately, the program hasn’t been around in ages, and my employer has ignored my many earnest requests to keep it on their computer systems. By its absence in my life, I have come to realize that when Simon and Garfinkel sang “where have you gone Joe Dimaggio a lonely nation cries out to you” they didn’t know the half of it.

WordPerfect 5.1 was fast, never crashed, and best of all had no cutesy nonsense adorning its page. In stark contrast to the word processing programs of today, there was no talking and swooshing paperclip like the one that infects Microsoft Word. Let me just add that I find computers, let alone paperclips that talk, really, really creepy. But with WordPerfect 5.1 there was just you and the blue screen, empty until you started writing. In short, the program announced that it was time to quit playing around and get serious. It would have none of this fooling with countless options or allow you to waste hours with the font and format changes that allow my students today to hand in beautiful, but content-deprived papers by the bushel.

But the real genius of 5.1 was in the commands: the boldness of F6, the finality of F7. And one command was particularly perfect: Alt-F3, the “reveal codes” function. By using this one computer code you could always get to the bottom of whatever problem ailed you. Something gone wacky with your margins or spacing?...just hit reveal codes and delete the offending change. Alt-F3 laid bare all the codes that had mysteriously crept into your document.

My fascination with this keystroke has led me to fantasize countless times about how useful it would be to have a larger “reveal codes” function in our lives. Clinton not telling the truth or Bush smirking his way through life...hit Alt-F3 and all their spin and idiocy would be swept away leaving only the bare, political reality. A student telling me that yet another grandparent has died this semester...by invoking Alt-F3 I’d learn that the old folks were alive and well in Goshen. In my fantasy life the core of our personal and national psychic substrata could be revealed at the touch of two buttons. Alt-F3 fused Freud’s dream of the liberating power of psychoanalysis with the fleeting hope that by excavating our national subconscious we could then repair those faulty codes and make our society healthy and whole again. In other words, it offered us the tantalizing glimpse of perfection in an otherwise imperfect world.

I realize this entire love-fest for a long discarded computer program could be relegated to the nostalgia file. But as Lou Reed, our punk poet laureate has noted, “I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine.” Ok, I confess that I use a Windows-based word processing program these days. And yes, this newer version has features I like and now regard as indispensable. But oh how I miss 5.1 and those bygone days when even I was considered a computer expert.

My friends, today we dwell in a parallel universe where none of the codes that rule our lives shall ever be revealed to us and where our guide through these thorny paths is not the poet Virgil but a dancing paperclip. This is progress? Beware!

Broadcast by Jonathan Nashel on April 12, 2002
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