Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (7 page)

As my father used to say, “Even if it was good, I wouldn't like it.”

The scientific loser of the century, as far as anything of practical importance to mankind goes, was the landing on the moon. It was a great $25 billion television show but not much else.

Nothing fascinates us more than considering what changes will take place on Earth after every one of us alive today is dead and gone.

Most of the science fiction written about the future centers on space exploration and life on other planets. There are always rocket ships on the book jackets. Maybe, though, the greatest changes will take place right here on Earth.

The National Research Council is spending $200 million a year on a fifteen-year effort to find out all about the genes that make people the way they are. In fifteen years, spending at that rate would cost us $3 billion. It sounds like a better place to put our money than on the moon.

You may recall from high school biology that every human being has forty-six chromosomes. When a man and a woman have sex that results in the fertilization of the egg in the female by a sperm from the male, the chromosomes divide evenly. The new life gets twenty-three of them from the man and twenty-three from the woman but no one can predict in advance which ones the baby will get. The chromosomes contain the genes, and it's the mixture of all these little rascals from two human beings that produces a totally different third human being.

“She looks just like you” means the baby got your blue-eyed gene or your snub-nose or blond-hair gene, but chances are the kid has more traits from ancestors of yours that you never knew than she does of yours.

If she's lucky, she didn't get your bad-temper gene or the gene that makes one of your toes go in the wrong direction.

In talking about their proposal, the scientists emphasize how much the study of our genes would mean in the elimination of some forms of cancer, cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's and manic depression. You can bet, though, that this isn't where the study of genes is going to get into trouble. The trouble will come when they start fooling around with what we're really like.

What's the Supreme Court going to rule when a hospital starts advertising that, for $1,500, it can get you the baby you want, boy or girl. If we end up with twice as many boys as girls, would the government pass a law forcing people to have girl babies until the numbers were equal?

What will the whole human race look like in a thousand years if everyone's father and mother can choose how their child will look and act? If blacks decide they're discriminated against because they're black and wish, therefore, to be a different color, will black parents take on different color genes? Everyone will want to be taller. Will we fit into our cars or our houses? Will they have to raise the hoop on the basketball court? And if our cars and our houses get bigger to fit us, will there be room on Earth?

If scientists can locate the genes that control intelligence, the whole world should end up smarter. Will smarter make people happier?

The danger, of course, is that we'd all end up too much alike. It is the stray, freak, longshot gene or combination of genes that produces the unpredicted genius and makes the human race so interesting. It's those aberrant genes that no scientist could plan that gave us Albert Einstein.

If anyone could lay down the law and make fooling around with
genes illegal everywhere in the world forever, it would be a good idea, but whenever there is knowledge about anything, someone uses that knowledge and you can bet that if gene-changing doesn't take place in the United States, it'll take place somewhere else in the world.

Americans will be six-footers in an eight-foot world.

The easy stores to go to are the big ones that have a lot of everything. You can go to a department store in a mall that has dresses, pants, paint, books, golf clubs, underwear, watches and wastebaskets. Upstairs they have furniture and rugs. Downstairs they have refrigerators and television sets. These stores are owned by a company whose name is listed on the stock exchange. There is a store just like it in the next city and the refrigerators and television sets are downstairs there, too.

As an addicted recreational shopper, I go to these big stores and I like them, but I mourn the gradual decline in the number of small stores that have just one thing and are owned by one person, not a corporation.

The Small Business Administration in Washington says 600,000 new small businesses have started up every year in the 1980s. During the 1970s there was an average of only 365,000 new small businesses a year. I hope that in the year 2089, a few hundred of the small family businesses that start up this year will be celebrating their hundredth year and will have a little footnote in gold letters on the sign out front saying
EST
. 1989. I hope the great-grandchildren of the founder will still be in the business, but in spite of this optimistic announcement by the SBA, you can't tell me there aren't fewer little businesses than there used to be.

The trouble is that according to an old rule of thumb in the business world, four out of five new businesses go belly up within five years. We lose something every time a small store or a small company that makes something goes out of business. It's more like a death in the family than a business failure. When the little bakery is bought by the big bakery, the bread is never so good again. No big corporation taking over a smaller company has ever improved the product. I could name a thousand products whose quality declined under the new management of
a corporate takeover. To tell you the truth, it's hard to think of a big brand product whose quality has not declined in the past ten years.

One of the reasons it's becoming more difficult for a small store to stay in business is that the small manufacturer, which once supplied the store with good quality products that were distinctive and different from those mass-produced for the chain stores, has been absorbed by the giant competitor or driven out of business. The small retail store, without a small manufacturer, ends up buying many of the same products the chain stores sell and the chain stores sell them for less. No one, not even a small-store customer as myself, can stand to pay $2.68 for an item he knows he can get for $1.98 someplace else.

I am not ungrateful to the big chain bookstores that sell millions of books. My heart, though, is with the small bookstore in your own town or in your neighborhood. It is likely that the proprietor—more often than not a woman—has read most of the books in the store and, while she's in business to make a living, she loves books better than money. In the big chain bookstore, a book may sell for 10 percent off but the salesperson has not read it or, very likely, any other book in the store, either.

The big stores have had a bad effect on the little stores in another way too. The little guys often have to band together and buy from some kind of cooperative so they can buy in volume. They get all their merchandise from one supplier, which puts them in a better competitive position with the giants. The bad part is, the quality of the merchandise in the small stores then isn't any better than the quality in the big ones. Furthermore, one small store is just like another.

I think you fellows in the sales department at newspapers that depend a lot on big chain stores for advertising revenues know this is all in good fun. Just kidding, fellas.

May seems early for graduation ceremonies but a lot of colleges have them then. The more a college charges, the earlier it has its graduation.

Graduation day is one of the most abrupt endings we come to in our whole lives. Most things dwindle away or, little by little, we change what we're doing. Not graduation. That's it. The end. Period.

Because of the abrupt interruption in life's activities for the graduate, there are very few times in anyone's life so bittersweet as that final day at high school or college. Graduates are glad it's over but they're sad it's over, too, and they're scared about their future.

Considering how much hostility and suspicion there is toward any really educated person by almost everyone with less than a high school education, we're lucky so many young people recognize what a good thing a higher education is.

Some people consider it almost a badge of honor not to have gone to high school. If they've been successful at all or even if they haven't, they brag about how little education they've had, just as if their ignorance had helped. They don't consider anything a college graduate does for a living as real work.

Last weekend I was joking with a friend of mine who never went to high school.

“I been working all day,” he said. “You probably ain't done a decent day's work in your life. Real work, I mean.”

He was kidding but only sort of. The fact that I get up at 5:37 every morning and don't come home until 6:30 in the evening doesn't impress him at all. He doesn't know how I spend my time but he's not willing to concede it's work because I wear a necktie and don't lift anything.

I suppose the resentment the uneducated have toward others is natural enough. One of the simple pleasures of life is to feel superior to someone. It doesn't have to be a mean feeling. Everyone needs to feel superior about something and there are lots of people who manage to feel superior about some pretty funny things. If I know how to change the oil in my car and you don't, I feel superior to you in this one regard even though you may be a nuclear physicist. All I have to do to feel pleasantly superior is to think about what I know, and ignore what you know that I don't.

The argument that will never be resolved in education is how much the process should be directed toward teaching practical subjects that will help students make a living and how much education should be pure academic work, the only practical end to which is the pleasure of knowing.

There isn't much money in just knowing things, as any out-of-work college professor can tell you, but I hope we never give up on education for its own sake. Even though there isn't any great commercial demand for philosophers, Shakespearean scholars or experts on the works of Byron, Keats and Shelley, I hope we continue to have students who devote their education to these matters.

Kingman Brewster, once president of Yale, said, “Perhaps the most fundamental value of a liberal education is that it makes life more interesting.

“It allows you to think things which do not occur to the less learned and it makes it less likely that you will be bored with life.”

I like my proud know-nothing friend but the world would be a sad place without young people who go to the trouble of suspending their lives for four years while they go to college.

I've listened to a hundred dutiful clergymen try, without success, to mitigate the sorrow of death for weeping survivors by quoting the Twenty-third Psalm or by soothingly suggesting death is something other than a tragedy. No one, though, uses words so well as to make friends and relatives of the deceased feel good at a funeral.

The death of an institution can never be so sad, but the end of a newspaper has many of the elements of the death of a friend.
The Knickerbocker News
in Albany, New York, was laid to rest at 2:30
P.M.
on April 15, 1988, and nothing I can say about its demise can mitigate the sorrow for those who knew it. I knew it.

The Knick
, as it was familiarly known, was part of my life because I grew up with it. When I was eight I waited for it to come. My friend Bud Duffie and I would spread it on the front porch to read the latest comic-strip episodes of Buck Rogers, Ben Webster and Little Orphan Annie.

When I was ten, I made the first money I ever had that wasn't given to me by my father. I delivered the paper to thirty-seven homes, or in the bushes near those homes, over a ten-block area in Albany.

One summer during my college years, I worked briefly in the newsroom of
The Knick
as a copyboy. While the job itself wasn't much, it was on the strength of an overstated line in a résumé regarding the importance of my work there that I was whisked out of the Seventeenth Field Artillery Battalion on maneuvers in Land's End, England, and assigned to the army newspaper,
The Stars and Stripes
, in London.

I have yellowing clippings from
The Knick
containing my name that Margie and my mother cut from it during World War II:
ALBANY BOY FLIES BOMBERS OVER GERMANY
.

And for the past eight years my column has appeared in
The Knickerbocker News
three days a week. How could I be anything but sad on the day of the death of an institution that has been so much a part of my life?

On reading of the demise of any newspaper, newspapermen and -women everywhere hear the faint, faraway toll of Hemingway's bell. There's a newspaper disease that's killing a lot of afternoon papers. No one is certain what causes it, what to do for the patients that have it or how to keep the healthy afternoon papers from getting it. In 1970 there were 1,429 daily afternoon newspapers published in the United States. By 1986 there were only 1,188. In 1987 23 more afternoon papers ceased publication and the number was down to 1,165.
The Knickerbocker News
is part of the statistic for 1988.

If
The Knick
were human someone would certainly say now, on the occasion of its demise, “It's a blessing.” The poor
Knick
was old and desperately ill. It had suffered terribly. It had the best care there is in the business, but there wasn't much the newspaper doctors could do. Even though it had no chance for survival, no one wanted to unplug the support systems that kept it alive. Everyone kept doing what they could for it even though they'd known for several years it was hopeless.