Friday, April 14, 2006

Why New Things Stink

A while back my car radio broke.  How was I to survive without WVPE?  After the initial panic, I eventually made my way to Grape Road to replace it.  On some level this little tragedy left me excited.  I now had an honest to God reason to upgrade my car audio system.  Ever the consumer, it also allowed me the opportunity to take a look at what had changed in the world of sound since the Carter Administration.  What I found was more than I could have imagined, and by the end of the day I was left with a deep feeling of emptiness.

Why?  Well, first off, I went to a bunch of stores where I was by far the oldest person looking at and touching these car stereos.  The music in the stores was both repulsive and deafening.  The love of strobe lights in these shops also left me with the queasy feeling that at any moment one of them could send me into cardiac arrest.  Even worse, every single car audio system was so complicated that I struggled to even find the power button.  After gamely pushing a few of the buttons on one unit a salesman came up to me and asked if he could help.  I use the word “salesman” here in quotes because the guy looked all of 15.  He began to show me systems that would set me back hundreds and hundreds of dollars.  I told him to stop this nonsense pronto.  I wanted something simple, with easy to use knobs . . . and a cassette deck.  My last request caught his eye.  He said “cassette deck?” in the way most of us might ask for something that was clearly illegal.  Yes, I told him, I truly wanted this 1970s state of the art recording device because I have tons of cassettes that I just can’t part with.  Also, I tape things off of the radio all the time—not Diane Rehm of course—and cassettes are just the easiest way to go. With a sad shake of the head he pointed me to the only audio system that had a cassette deck.  It was a poor little deck, stuck off in the corner.  I thought I saw cobwebs attached to it, but it might have been the strobe lights affecting my eyesight.  Adding insult to injury he tried to sell this to me by saying “our older customers like this one because it has big knobs.” After looking at it I realized that my life had come to this: I am, in the world of car radios anyway, on the ash heap of history.

I recall this little tale because I am continually struck by one of the central features of modern America: that we are all thrown onto this ash heap, that we are all fated to be cassette decks.  No one is immune because our very culture is designed to make all of us feel old, useless, and vaguely pre-Alzheimers-like by the time we’re 35 or so.  We live in a world that has a visceral hatred of the past.  This got me thinking about the wit and wisdom of Karl Marx.  Of the many things that commie got wrong, perhaps his most glaring error was his view of history.  Recall, Marx wrote, “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Sounds good, right?  Yeah, well, that insight might be true if you were hanging out in 19th century Europe, but here in present day Michiana I can tell you that my students are not exactly immobilized by their lack of knowledge about the past.  Like all sad history professors, I remain amazed at how the central features of our past slip out of the general consciousness— be it the century long battles between Catholics and Protestants, let alone who Joe McCarthy, Uncle Joe Stalin, or Joe Dimaggio were.  And I’ve gotten used to having many a student look at me . . . well, you know how they look at me when I begin to talk about such matters.

I realize that my little commentary here has somehow morphed from old car stereos into a discussion about the nature of history.  Humor me, ok?  Most importantly, please understand that I have plenty of students who make smart connections between the past and our present-day lives.  And I am by no means a Ludditte, smashing all machines around me.  In fact, I kinda like playing with new gadgets.  But we all have limits to how much we want to search out what is new, and mine was found on my car radio.  I shudder to think what I will do when my tv goes blank.

Broadcast by Jonathan Nashel on April 14, 2006
Commerce • Media & Technology • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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