Memoirs of a Professional Cad by George Sanders

Author:George Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2016-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

I often wonder if I really need a telephone. Is it a convenience or is it a nuisance? Perhaps it is as much one as it is the other. I am ambivalent about it. About my television set, I am less ambivalent. I know I don’t need it. I have been a slave to its novelty for the past seven years, but now that this novelty has worn off I find that I only turn it on occasionally when something very special is being presented. (Such as myself.)

About my car I am pathologically ambivalent. I know that I must work hard to support it, but from the residential district where I happen to live I cannot conveniently get to work without it.

My washing machine, my deep freeze, my electric dishwasher, my Waring mixer, my refrigerator and my electric garbage disposal unit belong to a more recondite part of my life. Consequently it is more difficult for me to appraise the value of the contribution that these devices make toward my comfort. I am aware only that they cost money and require constant maintenance.

Modem conveniences are the source of modern inconveniences. They create as many problems as they solve.

I am sometimes tempted to load my Hi-Fi, my radio alarm clock, and all the other parasitical devices of which I am the irresolute possessor, into my car and drive them – and my car – over a cliff and be done with it.

If there were some foreseeable end to technological improvement, if we could only say “Let’s call a halt at such and such a point of technical excellence, and from there on we will go no farther,” I would be a wholehearted subscriber to the system whose goal was to reach that point at the earliest possible moment.

But the system we have chosen can lead only to further enslavement to an ever mounting assortment of devices, the workings of which we do not understand and must depend upon others to keep in good repair.

When I travel abroad and find myself in the company of people who belong to a society that is denied the so-called benefits of modem technology, I get along very well. I find that I rediscover to some extent the lost art of conversation and enjoy once again such simple primordial pleasures as going for a walk, sitting by the fire or reading a book. Consequently I wonder if there is any point in being up-to-date.

America is the yardstick by which progress throughout the world is measured. I sometimes think back to the America I knew twenty years ago and wonder if its people are any happier today than they were then, and if its products, though infinitely more variable in number and ingenious in design, are as durable, as honestly made and as desirable in terms of things one wants to possess.

America, more than any other country, is a culture of group pressures. The desire to conform is very strong and the approval of the herd is assiduously sought.

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