REWIRE YOURSELF

Sound Escape

REWIRE YOURSELF

by

Richard Robinson

I don’t get it, I admit it. Possibly I’m the wrong person to try to figure it out since I don’t even understand why people watch TV anymore. But I try.

It started on the streets of New York, certain ethnic groups carrying huge portable cassette-radios blaring discoshit along the sidewalks. It got so painful that even the politicians passing by in their limos heard it. And promptly made it more or less illegal to disturb others with such cybernetic displays.

But even today there are ’still types out with it. Mainly young black males, some young hispanic males, somehow needing to attract attention by lugging 10 or 15 pounds of mylar chrome through the streets pounding out a distorted boogie. It makes me want to ask, hey man, why? But I don’t ask, I value my life more than my eardrums. And when I’m in electronic stores and see these guys come in for a new set of batteries, watch how they make the transaction like they were standing on a street corner dealing a nickel bag, well, a discussion about slavery to Duracell technology doesn’t seem fruitful.

I guess I should be glad it’s only portable radios. In other times it might have been who could carry the biggest sword. But it is sad, because no matter how big the radio, how loud it plays, the man’s still got ’em.

And now, from the land of the rising sun, where everybody says yes when they mean no, comes another cybernetic experience. Sony’s Walkman and its competitors. Tiny stereo cassette players with featherweight headphones. Very Japanese: silent, ho one is disturbed. My subway survey shows they’re mostly worn by female whites in their early to mid-twenties. My friends says all the artists and models are listening to them as they pad through the streets of New York. Except they have another word for artists.

Where the blaring transistor radio extroverts, wants attention is waiting for someone to complain; the Walkman introverts, escapes, isn’t there, the real blank generation. At least the guys with the transistors I can hear coming, get out of the way. The Walkmen and Walkwomen come silently, spaced out, and if another one bumps into me in their spacepace I’m gonna scream so loud they’ll hear me.

They have always been haves and have nots. Readers and illiterates. But with the aid of modern science and technology there are now three distinct types: illiterates, readers, and plug-ins.

Unlike the illiterates who are unfortunate victims, and the readers who are often smart enough not to believe everything they read in the papers, the plug-ins think they’re smart, think if they watch TV they know what’s happening, think they’re literate. Even before the Sesame Street generation has had a chance to grow up and be stupid, the first wave of plug-ins are upon us, humans who’d much rather watch a video tape than read a book, who look down their noses at the illiterates with their blaring transistors as they slip on their Walkman headphones.

Plug-ins. They don’t hear what I say even though they think they’re listening. I know people who watch a lot of TV, a lot. Sometimes they read newspapers, because they haven’t saved up enough to buy a Walkman yet. When they tell me about something they read in the paper, well, if I’ve also read it I notice they invariably get most of the details wrong. But then again, lemon flavor and lemony, disclaimer living, it can get to you,

Are you a potential plug-in? Experiment: Watch a TV sitcom. Every time the laugh track comes on, you must laugh until it stops. At the end of a half hour if you don’t think its funny, you are plug-in prone. You are ready for TVEnders, where they teach you how to read, what to do when your TV is unplugged.

The Walkman is the worst of this. People lurching through the street with the equivalent of a bag over their heads. Life is too much too soon, not as much fun when it’s real rather than pre-recorded.

My sense of politics includes concern for the illiterates, and concern for the reader who fosters the system that produces the illiterates. But I view the plug-ins with more than concern. The plug-ins are the first signs of a future that isn’t going to work. TV doesn’t work, the Walkman doesn’t work, and if you think life works as pre-recorded magnetic impulses, you are in big trouble. Somewhere along the line science and technology have screwed up' reality to the point were now too many people believe that reality is the least real event in the universe. They think physics has more to do with life than hot water, some of them even think physics is hot water.

Advice to the fittest: rewire yourself, unplug.