Smart Vacuum Cleaner It doesn’t look so smart anymore. The iRobot Roomba i7+ may have AI but my black Lab has teeth.
Smart Lawn Mower Who needs a $2,430 Husqvarna Automower 315XH that mows the lawn automatically when you’ve got a teen who mows the lawn automatically (if a lot of nagging counts as automation) in return for the car keys? (Although there is the matter of that $2,430 body and fender repair from when Buster backed into the phone pole.)
Home Surveillance Camera 5g hi-def 2.0 version. I mentioned I have children. Do you think I want to know what goes on when they’re home and my wife and I are not? Besides, they leave evidence from which even Sherlock’s dimwit sidekick Dr. Watson could make accurate deductions. “I detect that someone has tried to flush a pony keg down the toilet.”
And that’s just some of the latest stuff from the “Internet of Things.” What kind of things will get smart next? Are we ready for “Smarty Pants”? This is a pair of slacks that will send you a text message: “We really do make your butt look big.”
The Internet of Things—when I hear the phrase I feel like things are not only getting too smart but starting to gang up on me. It makes my flesh crawl. Which is medical information that my smartwatch would send directly to my in-home senior caregiver. If I owned a smartwatch. Which I don’t because I own Chicago’s first album, released in 1969, when people were still skeptical about the benefits of technology, even the analog kind with very limited intelligence.
As I was walking down the street one day
A man came up to me and asked me what the time was on my watch
And I said
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so I can’t imagine why
We’ve all got time enough to cry
Cry, “Enough already with the Internet of Things!”
Plus there’s this to consider . . . Two ordinary old married men are playing golf.
First Golfer: Take a look at this golf ball. Doesn’t matter how bad you hook or slice. It’s got a flashing red light and a beeper and a GPS chip and a Bluetooth tracking locator and a camera that sends you a selfie of its location.
Second Golfer: Wow! Where did you get that golf ball?
First Golfer: I found it.
Lessons in Fake News from Two Old Masters of the Form
On February 17, 2017, I noted down one of Donald Trump’s Twitter messages. This is not something I usually do. The words that come from this president don’t tend to be informative. Not for nothing do “ignorant” and “ignore” have the same Latin root. And the meaning of the phrase in Psalm 8 “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings” is not that the infantile have anything substantive to say. The meaning is that even squalling brats can recognize what’s clearly evident. In the case of Psalm 8 this is the glory of God. In the case of our squalling brat president evidence doesn’t exist. It’s fake news. Or, as Trump would put it, “FAKE NEWS.”
So, as I was saying, I copied this particular tweet into my “Trump Miscellany” notebook:
“The FAKE NEWS media (failing nytimes, NBCNews, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
This was nothing Trump hadn’t said before while he was campaigning. And it wasn’t anything he wouldn’t say again—and again—during his presidency. But that particular tweet, just a month after he was inaugurated, seemed gnomic, apothegmatic, and—not to tease the man for his near illiteracy—pithy.
What was also interesting was that Trump might have gotten it right about the oppositional relationship between the news and the citizenry.
One of the great newsmen of all time, H. L. Mencken, agreed. In Heathen Days, the third volume of his autobiography, published in 1943, Mencken says, “The plain people . . . are always, in fact, against newspapers.” And to make a further, prescient case for the yet unborn Trump, Mencken went on to say, “and they are always in favor of what reformers call political corruption. They believe that it keeps money in circulation, and makes for a spacious and stimulating communal life.”
Certainly the past four years have been stimulating, and news coverage of Trump and his administration has been spacious, to say the least, and plenty of money has been kept in circulation.
As for “FAKE NEWS,” it has been with us for quite a while. Mencken has a gleeful passage in his autobiography’s second volume, Newspaper Days, published in 1941, about reporting for the Baltimore Herald during a slow news week in 1903:
A wild man was reported loose in the woods over Baltimore’s northern city line, with every dog barking for miles around, and all women and children locked up. I got special delight out of the wild man, for I had invented him myself.
Another lesson from Mencken is that we should be wary about “feuds” between politicians and the media. In Heathen Days Mencken recounts how, during the 1910s, the newspaper where he was a reporter and where he would remain for the rest of his working reporter days, the Baltimore Sun, was engaged in a huge political quarrel with Baltimore’s mayor J. Harry Preston. Never mind that both Preston and the Sun’s editor were die-hard Democrats.
According to Mencken, if Preston “proposed to enlarge the town dog-pound” the Sun would denounce it “as an assault upon the solvency of Baltimore, the comity of nations, and the Ten Commandments.” And if the Sun editorialized in favor of clean alleys “Preston went about the ward clubs warning his heelers that the proposal was only the opening wedge for anarchy, atheism, and cannibalism.”
Mencken confesses, “My own share in this campaign of defamation was large and assiduous.” And then he says, “I was fond of [Preston], thought he was doing well as mayor, and often met him amicably at beer-parties.”
Mark
