IT'S GOOD to hear that the US Federal Communications Commission is back in business – thinking about the internet and wireless telecommunications, and not so much about assessing huge fines for broadcasters who say "poop" on air, writes GARRISON KEILLOR
The new chairman, Julius Genachowski (46), is a venture capitalist who is more interested in technological advances and in bringing high-speed access to all Americans, and so the world moves on. Thank you, sir.
How a guy so young came to be named Julius is a question for another time.
Mobile phones are more crucial than cracking down on vulgarity, as I found out last week when mine – a small black object the size of a box of breath fresheners – went missing.
When I found it in the washing machine, I said several vulgar things. It had drowned. I pressed # and * and ghi and mno – nothing – and was out of commission for an hour while I trucked on down to the mobile-phone store.
Here’s how crucial mobile phones are. In Minnesota, it is illegal to text while driving – trying to type on a tiny keypad at 70mph is crazy (“On my way. Be there in 20 minu – Oh NO NO NO aiiieeeeeeeee”) – but it is legal to make calls while driving.
In my case, this means removing my glasses so I can see to scroll down the directory while steering with my knees.
I call my mother while driving, which is exciting for her since she is 94 and remembers when phones were attached to the wall and you talked on them while standing still. “Is that safe?” she asks.
No, it’s not, but neither is life itself. Animal fats, ultraviolet rays, unknown persons trying to get you to carry things aboard an aircraft, Argentinian women trying to lure you down to Buenos Aires – it’s a minefield out there.
My hero Barry Halper died in his white convertible on highway 12 east of St Paul in the spring of 1961 when he was 20.
He was excited to start a new job as a newsman at a radio station and crashed into the rear end of a school bus. He was a tall, swanky guy who loved comedy and radio.
Had he not died, I might have become a high-school English teacher, but I seem to have adopted his ambition instead. And so it goes.
Back then, the highway meant freedom. We were crazy about cars and wary of the cops who lay in wait for us. I loved to visit my aunts in Isle, Minnesota, one reason being the perfectly straight stretch of highway from Ogilvie to Isle through scrub pine forest on which I kept my 1956 Ford coupe at 100mph (pre-seatbelt, mind you) for 20 miles.
It was a lawless stretch of road, houses few and far between. I considered the hazard of some old man in a pickup truck pulling on to the road and our two lives merging, but drove fast anyway, and when I got to Isle, I resumed being a nice Christian boy with good manners.
There is a little legislator inside me that wants to crack down on speeders and mobile-phone users, and there is also a teenager looking for open highway.
Not so unusual. We want contradictory things.
A person can love opera and leave the Met walking on air, and yet kd lang singing Cryingis opera too, and a kid with a beat-up guitar who gets hold of Key to the Highwaycan tear at your heart like nobody's business.
So we should tread lightly, be smart, listen to the opposition. They are speaking to our own contradictions. The censors have their day and then we move on.
All that noise that judge Sonia Sotomayor listened to so patiently about the danger of empathy – respect it for what it is, a gentle pushback, and then move her into her new chambers.
And then take up health insurance. We have an expensive, inefficient, treacherous, Kafkaesque system that is a drag on business and preys on the vulnerable. But something in us is leery of reform, and the opposition clusters like a flock of ravens on the highway shouting, “No!”. We should slow down a little, and then they’ll fly up in a cloud and we’ll go on. – (Tribune media services)