After carrying on about what wonderful parents they were to my grandchildren, cloaking the caveats under a thick blanket of generalization, I launched into my memorized remarks about recent attacks by so-called environmentalists on the Thingie® itself and the innumerable manufacturing and labor practices of which they disapprove—even as their own offices and homes are plastered with the now indispensable product, citing down to the exact penny the amount a certain prominent left-wing law firm has spent so far this year on Thingies® and Thingie® products, without mentioning by name your father’s firm. By now the initial flux of people rushing in and out of the open French doors had stabilized and there was a steady increase in the number of people crowding inside, holding drinks and plates of barbecued meat, and briefly whispering to neighbors, no doubt finding out what this was all about.
This was the moment I was hoping for and had prepared for, to announce my grand theory of cosmic recycling, in which I propose that what environmentalists suffer from is myopic tunnel vision with no sense at all for the long view, the very long view, the fifty- or one hundred-million-year long view. Ultimately everything, even those substances deemed toxic by the Chicken-Littles of the world, will be smoothly and thoroughly recycled by one of the grand actions of the solar system or the galaxy or the whole universe itself. Everything, not just some things, will be frozen or vaporized or crushed back into the elemental matter, out of which we will be free to evolve again, from a clean slate. All attempts therefore to forestall the process by misguided efforts at so-called conservation are in themselves pointless and therefore wasteful and a drag on the economy through the lowering of profits of the corporate citizens of the world, thanks to which you are all here today.
The elaboration of this grand topic took nearly half an hour, a constant race against the restlessness of the drunken crowd, during which dusk usefully turned to night—and I knew I should begin moderating my vigorous arm gestures so that when the moment came for your grandmother to approach me and touch my elbow, signal that I should begin to wind up, I should not accidentally strike her with an out-flung arm. The applause was not what I had hoped for, thunderous certainly, but coming just as I was filling my lungs for my usually inimitable last line. But perhaps as well. In the heat of the crowded room, perhaps an effect of the scotch, I realized that my crowning phrase, my last words, had vanished from my brain.
Here’s your camera, the young man said, thrusting it back at me with a rather rough gesture. It was only then that I realized he was not my bodyguard after all.
20. 1:12 SCALE 1986 MERCEDES–BENZ 480SL COUPE
I HAVE COMMUNICATED TO THE CEO OF THE HOLLYwood studio that Thingie® Corporation International has just acquired my displeasure with the fact that so often in a movie the villain drives the best cars, such as Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and Lamborghinis—while the impecunious heroes, who live in ungated communities, invariably get around in old Fords and Chevys or even antique VW Bugs. Why, I ask, is reality being so clearly distorted here—reality which any reasonable person can observe by driving through all kinds of neighborhoods in almost any large city in America. What you will see is that the older and shabbier the car the greater likelihood of its being driven around by a member of the criminal class, and worse, that it is likely to be piloted in the manner of a battering ram, to judge from the sad state of its body work, or what is left of it. Here, my good children, are your villains, not the upstanding and hardworking Conservative Republicans who are paying taxes through the nose to keep these people on welfare and food stamps and trying to shore up their crumbling schools and neighborhoods and offering them careers in the armed forces and who, to dull the edge of their own selfless sacrificial pain as taxpayers, now and then go out and buy a fine brand-new expensive car.
I have had my personal digitizer go over the tapes of a couple of recent thrillers, The Blackington Receipt and Stall, and re-edit them to switch cars around so that the so-called heroes now properly buy the best money can buy while the villains get the rustbucket wrecks. This does create a jarring note, I admit, where the so-called heroes slip in and out of their fine motorcars dressed in ragged, dirty clothes, while the well-tailored villains appear quite at ease in their cars with ripped upholstery and dirty, cracked glass. However, at your ages, you may not notice. My personal digitizer is still working on this.
I have also conveyed my displeasure to the studio at the common practice of having the young athletic actor succeed at pinning the guilt invariably on the old man at the pinnacle of the latter’s professional or business career, the great mentor or senior executive or successful entrepreneur who is found to be at the root of a conspiracy to murder usually an innocent young female who stands in the way of his obtaining one last triumph and ending his career in the blaze of glory of a long well-articulated speech and a dozen golden parachutes wafting down from the sky. It seems to me that most of these plots could be easily re-jiggered to turn the young athletic actor—commonly a closet liberal democrat—or even the seemingly innocent female, into the villain and convert the old man with his nice Mercedes or Bentley into the hero who saves the day, as is so much more common in everyday life. That way neither cars nor wardrobes would need to be altered. Expunging a few words would probably do it.
And perhaps adding a few lines about the strengths of the free market economy and how many of the shots inside cars and offices and homes in particular could be enlivened by the addition of whatever number of Thingies® might be necessary to reflect the realities of our times. Hundreds per scene, I would think. We have calculated that on average the office worker and car driver and a domestic partner at work in a typical kitchen either touches or looks at or otherwise interacts with a Thingie® every nineteen seconds during his waking life and that Thingies® figure in twenty-one percent of all dreams and nightmares.
All of this is consistent with the fact that the main purpose of Hollywood movies, as you two already know, is to teach people how to use and experiment with exciting new technologies—and how to recycle products of obsolete technologies by turning them into weapons or objects to be disposed of by blowing them up or pushing them over cliffs or sending them to the bottom of the sea.
You are too young to know that Hollywood taught America first how to drive and later how to use computers. On the same principle we’re planning to teach America how to use the new Thingie®2.0 on its forthcoming introduction, after three years of intensive research costing hundreds of millions of dollars. We have only recently leaked its final trade name, Thingamajig®, was well the name of the new luxury line intended for use in CEO offices and suites of select luxury hotels worldwide, the Thingamabob®, though its release date will be about two months after the Thingamajig®. Revenues are projected to rise twenty-three per annum ad infinitum, to the perpetual benefit of your inheritances.
In the course of placing the silver 1986 Mercedes-Benz 480SL Convertible Coupe with me in my motoring cap behind the wheel, also 1:12 scale, in its place on the next to the top shelf of your book case, Fabian—you were using the bathroom before being tucked in—my hand brushed against some folded up papers which, given this unusual location for them, I could not help but take down and briefly examine before stuffing them inside my sports coat. To my consternation and bemusement. I’m sure, Fabian, you know exactly what I am talking about, though by the time you read this you may have entirely forgotten the balloon-like figures in pencil with stick arms and legs and grotesquely enlarged items we used to call in the old days “private parts.” I suspect this is not your work. A certain boldness of line suggests an older child, possible your cousin Barton Delahunt, who seems to specialize in coming into your room to test the strength of each of your toys and the various parts of your games, which often enough is not equal to his own. A tall heavy-set kid fed too much protein and with cheeks flushed with feverish visions of what he can crush or dismember, he is the only one of your playmates easily able to reach the top bookshelf by standing on a
chair. The fact that he has not yet molested any of the models of your collection is testimony to the fear in which he holds me owing to regular threats I hiss to him in the hallway, to the effect that I will drown him in the toilet if he so much as lays a single finger on any one of the models in either your collection or that of your sister Rowena. I am mainly upset that he is the son of the most upright Conservative Republican branch of your grandmother’s family (ConTain RazorWire, a long dormant but now successful branch of the Barbed Wire Robber Baron fortune, through some lucrative prison contracts—their personal worth being a modest $163 million), and has so stubbornly resisted the example and teachings of his parents.
I see he has also provided you with a catchy little verse to while away the dark hours of the night. Mary had a little lamb and kept it in a bucket, and every time she went away the rooster used to fuck it. I admit that it is very difficult to get these things out of the head once they are so insidiously inserted there, and I know it is almost impossible to resist the temptation to whisper them into the tender little ears of your playmates and even your little sister and watch the verse make the rounds of your third-grade class until finally they reach the leathery sunburned ears of your teacher Ms. Plummets (on whose account I have been stalling on my current annual contribution; the denseness of the school director, who seems oblivious to my many hints, is staggering) whose lifestyle and pedagogy leave much to be desired. From what I can gather she has banned chewing gum and Thingies® from her classroom, and from the garbled accounts you now and then provide, Fabian, she is trying to instill a sense of guilt in her students regarding their privileged backgrounds. I cannot convey to you the degree of anguish suffered by your mother—she wisely has concealed this from you—when you came home apparently proud, at least for a few minutes, that Ms. Plummets had enrolled each of her twelve students in a different environmental organization. Yours was a deliberate slap in my face, you could not entirely realize, being the Pacific Northwest Tall Timber Alliance, which has managed to put out of bounds to our paper-producing subsidiaries so many millions of acres that we have been forced to move our operations abroad, seriously degrading our profit margins in the process. When Deirdre called me in the middle of the night—I was over New Guinea—I got on the phone immediately to the Attorney General, demanding that he bring down the entire Bill of Rights on Ms. Plummets’s shaved head and nose ring, but when it turned out she had bought these memberships out of her own salary and not out of school funds, we had to turn back the FBI just as they were preparing to cordon off the entire school.
But I stray. Given Ms. Plummets’s anarchist ideology, once she finally gets wind of Mary had a little lamb, I will not put it past her to have one of you write it up on the blackboard so that—this is typical liberal democrat thinking— you can all memorize it and even chant it together and write term papers on it and organize a parade with banners and songs based on the lines, up and down the streets and docks of Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Village, to demonstrate how liberated she is.
I realize I have left too late in your lives my lectures on Industrial Sex—but also must add that your father has categorically forbidden me to address the issue with either of you—so it is likely that these words will reach you after all the damage is done, when you come of legal age and I can communicate with you freely and I no longer have to fear your father carrying out threats to seek a court injunction against me. All I need point out, however, is that your house, like any in the industrial world, is equipped with countless connecting devices which suggest that the screw or bolt fits into the nut, the plug into the socket, and so on, and that as a result there is no need to seek titillation in crude pencil drawings and obscene doggerels. There is quite enough just lying around.
Despite my urges to the contrary—a lit match would do it easily—I have decided to include Barton Delahunt’s art work and poetry as part of the duplicate collection I am maintaining for you, along with copies of my videos of you and Rowena accepting each of the models and my late-night written ruminations on the subject, most of them composed in the air while the world sleeps below—as I am one of those fortunate mortals who is quite happy with three hours sleep each night. At any rate these duplications are insurance against the theft or destruction of your own primary collection, so that when you finally reach an age equal to my own and come across it you will be able to experience both the shame you should have experienced at your young age but also—to be frank and man-to-man about it—possibly a tickle of delight at the memory of the smutty little verse.
21. 1:18 SCALE 1988 LEARJET TWIN
THE 1988 LEARJET TWIN WAS A CONSIDERABLE improvement in terms of speed and general capaciousness over what it replaced, the Aero Commander, which was necessary for me to keep up with our rapidly expanding business—though I was to continue to use seat 18A in commercial flights abroad for another three years. Much of the last part of the decade and through much of the nineties I was constantly in the air giving talks, shaking up new acquisitions, opening new distribution centers and the like. As a result I was lucky to spend two or three nights a week at home in the Manor and often Deirdre was gone during at least one of them, away on her charity work for the usual lost causes.
Be that as it may, if you flick the switch on the underside of the Learjet fuselage it will turn on the battery-powered light inside, illuminating an excellent scale model of me sitting in a padded, swivel armchair, with my seat belt on, and a telephone receiver pressed to my right ear, in front of my flight desk. Your grandmother Deirdre, I regret to report, was hardly an enthusiastic partner in the explosive growth of Thingie® Corporation International. Why do you keep wanting more? she nagged me repeatedly, especially during our late night phone calls when I was in the air. Why do things have to keep getting more and more complicated? A little grass hut on a deserted island somewhere, that is all I long for. I had stopped bothering to point out that we already had several of those reserved for our exclusive use on our development at Tiki-Tango Atoll, but she was never satisfied. With servants hiding in the bushes, she quickly objected, waiting to rush out with cold drinks or hot towels or ringing telephones? Failing to understand as usual that if you don’t employ the natives they’ll resume their former lives of raping and pillaging.
I cannot count the times I have explained to her the difference between men and women, which I will pass on to you two young ones now in order to save you the trouble of trying to discover it later all on your own, with the usual disastrous results—except in the Tuggs family, which has been divorce-free for more than 150 years. And will stay that way.
Men, you see, love complexity in things but prefer simplicity in people, while women prefer simplicity in things but love complexity in people. This also accounts for the difference between manly Conservative Republicans and effeminate liberal democrats.
Things, my little ones: we live in the great crowning age of things, in which each year our national industrial genius picks up some hitherto simple object and makes it far better and more complex. The piece of chalk broken off from a cliff becomes the pencil cut from the forest and mined from the earth, in turn becoming the typewriter requiring iron mines and steel mills, in turn becoming the laptop, whose bits and pieces are drawn from the ends of the earth and which contain enough brainpower to launch a rocket to the moon and beyond. The wheel becomes the cart, becomes the bicycle, becomes finally the automobile with thousands of moving parts and electronic circuits, busying the restless mind of mankind through wakefulness and sleep. We have reached, my pets, an age of unimaginable complexity, a world of men making things and fixing them and throwing them away and making them over and over again, more and more complex each time, luxuriating in the intricacy they have mastered, destroying with one hand, building with another, faster, higher, wider, deeper, heavier, lighter. Men race to invent and make more and more things each year to see who can sell the most things, who can cover the entire earth with them and who can finally replace the so called natural wo
rld with man-made things—leading to that climactic moment when finally we, with all our things, become the natural world itself.
This should be not far off, according to the figures I am being supplied concerning the paving over of raw land and the converting of forests into useful industrial products like Thingies® and the plans for processing useless icebergs into drinking water and—of course—into bags of ice to help counter the effects of global warming, which I have always regarded as yet another business opportunity, perhaps the greatest ever in the history of civilization. At the present moment, the main tool is the computer—which appears to work flawlessly, however, only in the movies. I have talked to our studio about this and have suggested that computers ought to crash much more often in thrillers, which would add excitement to boring and predictable chase sequences.
Now I am fully aware that my philosophy of the complex has now and then been ridiculed by those critics who rightly observe that the Thingie® is paradoxically one of the most elegantly simple inventions of all time—while overlooking the fact that the Thingie®, unchallenged tool used to keep track of the proliferating things of the world, has been the foundation for the extraordinary growth in both the complexity and the sheer number of man-made things in the world. My private motto has always been More things, more Thingies®. And more Thingies® means more toys, more models, more shares, more bonds, more real estate for my own lovely two grandchildren.
Petroleum Man Page 9
