The Weekly Screed (#571)

Fear and loathing at the Consumer Electronics Show
by David Benjamin

LAS VEGAS — So, it’s the first day of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and I’m stuck in a nerd queue long enough to wrap twice around the Death Planet in Star Wars IV: A New Hope. You can spot me, because I’m the one reading a book (Enough by Donald E. Westlake). One of my fundamental rules of life is: “You never know when you’re gonna get stuck someplace. Take a book.”

This is not a fundamental rule for anyone else here. CES is a technology get-together. A book is not a technology; you can tell because it lacks a ring-tone.

Next day, I’m elbowing my way through the rubberneckers, booth-babes, propeller-heads and bald albinos on the CES show floor — a scene only Fellini could truly appreciate. I happen to mention to a guy beside me that “I don’t carry a phone.” “Oh my God!” he goes. He turns to stare. At first, he smiles. He thinks I’m joshing. When he realizes I’m not, he looks as though I’d just said I prefer to first decapitate the toddlers I abduct on weekends, before raping them and feeding them — in bite-size morsels — to my pet crocodile. The guy leaves, hurriedly.

I don’t fit in here. For instance, I’m in line again. I mark my book and attempt conversation. The queue itself reminds me of this nature show I saw — about the rather scary mating habits of king cobras. I broach the subject, facetiously. More stares. Later, hearing someone mention portable music devices, I home in on the wrong word (“music”) and I eagerly relate the remarkable tale of how Norman Granz, founder of Verve records, sat Art Tatum down in 1953 to record what later came to be known as Tatum’s “solo masterpieces.” But Tatum played piano. A piano, despite its infinity of ring-tones, is not a portable music device. Again, I get that stare.

Finally, I take a stab at politics, mentioning Mitt Romney’s performance at a New Hampshire Primary debate. More stares, but this time they include a hint of fear and loathing. (So many toddlers, so few crocodiles.)

Why do I do this? For something like 25 straight years, I have faced conversational futility at CES. But I never get used to being surrounded by people whose idea of an “issue” worthy of several hours’ animated discourse is the groundbreaking reduction of bezel-width on flat-panel LCD displays from 1 inch to 1 millimeter.

My real problem? Homogeneity gives me the creeps.

Even in the 60’s, while I believed heart-and-soul in ending the carnage in Vietnam, I skipped my chance to march with the Moratorium crowd. Nor did I attend a single Gene McCarthy rally. And I neglected to sing a verse of “Alice’s Restaurant” at my draft physical. I mean, we were all of us united in our skepticism about the war. But I was skeptical of anti-war. I doubted the efficacy of 100,000 people chanting the same ten passionate words — to no one who disagreed with them — over and over again.

At CES, my discomfort with unanimity approaches claustrophobia. Do these people talk of nothing but smart-phone apps, 3-D TV market penetration and SoCs? Can they? Should they?

Why would they?

And what’s an SoC?

I get no relief by fleeing the show, because, overflowing the streets (well, street — everybody's on the Strip) are a million people convinced, despite the insidious disappointment of actually being here, that Las Vegas is a swell place to spend a) a vacation and b) thousands of dollars that might otherwise go to their kids’ education. Many of them lurch from casino to casino sucking on pastel cocktails in tall plastic cups adorned with toothpick umbrellas. All million of them are not carrying a book.

Although I identify with neither of these two chillingly homogeneous populations, I get along tolerably. On the Strip, I’m invisible. At CES, unless I foolishly expose my phonelessness or talk about coitus among cobras, they assume I’m one of them — else why am I here? Even if they see me gazing down at a strange analog wireless device, occasionally turning a page, my eccentricity doesn’t register. To me, it’s a novel. In their eyes, it could be an electronic tablet in a novel form-factor. It might even be a prototype!

So, anyhow, a week or so later I’m accessing digital video on an obsolete (one-inch bezel) TV. It shows South Carolina Primary rallies for Republicans Romney, Gingrich and Santorum. I see, in these crowds, a pervasive sense of security and coziness. No wonder, because all these folks aren’t just Republicans. They are uniformly — in a state where almost a third of the population is African-American — as white as an egret’s ass.

And I can’t help it. I get the creeps.

I realize that some of humanity’s greatest advances (noodles, for example, and the Blues) have emerged from homogeneous peoples. But I’ve also observed that homogeneity can turn a bad idea into an institution, by marshalling the power of numbers and the intoxication of demagogy.

At CES, the institutional credo is that everyone on earth should “consume” costly devices full of “features” that they don’t really need and — for the most part — don’t understand and never use. But this can’t go on, because — the credo continues — consumers (people) should discard these devices well before they’re worn out, in order to buy newer, costlier models, preferably in greater numbers. The institutional credo of CES is that this relentlessly narrowing cycle of breakneck obsolescence and vast material waste enhances the quality of life, increases leisure and makes consumers happy.

Which I doubt, which is why — each year at CES — I suffer a case of the creeps.

The institutional credo of the Romney/Gingrich/Santorum GOP, which has morphed in just a few dizzying generations from the Party of Lincoln to the American Christian White People’s Party, is that “they” (as typified by the tall dark usurper in the White House) have taken America from “us.” And “we,” real Americans, must take it back, else our nation will devolve into something “we can’t even (hint, hint) recognize.”

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I get the creeps too easily.