From My Corner of the Café

-         G. Clarence Whippington

Harvard law professor John Palfrey’s new book, Born Digital:  Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, crashed bookstore shelves this summer (and ironically enough, hardback copies – with pages and all that other cumbersome “book” stuff – are selling briskly).  Excerpts which I have read so far suggest to me that we older adults, especially parents and teachers, are in need of help in “connecting with” younger people who know no other world than one in which personal computers, IPods, I-phones, Kindles, Blackberries, and the internet in general rule over all.  We doddering folks, it seems, who can look back mistily at typewriters, rotary phones, and yes, stereos, are like old babies who must be led, if not kicking and screaming then certainly griping and mumbling, into the Digital Age.  We long ago forgot that we could not figure out how to run the VCR, for now this world is filled with many, many more things we cannot figure out.  We are like late-18^th century farmers who gazed at factory smokestacks on the horizon and foresaw only doom.  Our children, even the grown-up ones, are sharper than we are, cleverer, as they navigate – nay, as they commandeer the modern world with little darting gestures and the language of the clicking keypad.

Department of Education officials in states around the country are giving in to this new kind of generation gap.  Almost desperately, they are ordering their befuddled teachers into technology training workshops, and like lemmings, the teachers go.  “Train us, oh, wise Computer Guy, for we know nothing.  Your ways are mysterious to us.”  Beyond that, many school districts are placing laptops on the laps of teenagers (except for that ever-growing percentage of obese children who are, of course, sans laps) in the naïve belief that they will use them for academic purposes.  And robotically, sounding himself very much like the automated voice in your computer, the superintendent says, “We ought to be preparing our children for the future – 2010, 2020, 2030…”

I beg to differ.  We ought to be preparing our children for thinking and problem-solving skills, because problems themselves never really go away.  As much as we human beings might have achieved on our relatively short ride so far, I believe there is something fundamentally wrong with us.  Socrates, in his tedious and annoying manner, began to get at a few answers, and the Assembly voted for his execution.  In more recent times, Martin Luther King, Jr., offered us the very simple solution of peace, brotherhood, compassion, and he was soon felled by the bitterness which festers in the human soul.  And Jesus Christ… well, I need not go on.

In any case, I would rather know that my own son and daughter are in classrooms in which they are engaging in thoughtful discussions and lively exchanges of ideas, and for which they are writing wonderful arguments which turn out to be expressions of their own minds at work and not the cuttings and pastings of someone else’s blog.  Certainly, they will use computers to assist them, just as we used the library stacks, dictionaries, and typewriters.  Admittedly, the rapidity with which information can be accessed today is thrilling, but that only means that the journey of becoming educated is a bit easier at certain junctures, but the quest itself remains arduous.  Otherwise, we are merely rushing into a void.  Answers which are too easily had will never be worth as much as those which take a lifetime of seeking.

So, am I as sharp as the so-called digital native, or am I merely a poor digital moron, fumbling my way toward a grave which will swallow me and all of my worn-out mythology and quaint philosophy?  Well, let us see:  I can spell reasonably well all by myself, without being “chekked.”  And I can do most of a New York Times crossword without looking the answers up online.  And I can talk knowledgably and without risk of embarrassing myself about things I have learned from a number of books that I regard as great works.  And I have seen the Sistine Chapel and the Prado in Madrid and a hundred other amazing places which in my log of sensory experience are anything but digital – they are whole, round, and full of wonder.

But some of the best ones are the simplest.  I remember that when I was little my father had a big, old cabinet-style stereo.  Sometimes he would allow me to carefully remove an LP record from its cardboard cover and then from its thin paper sleeve.  The cherry-red label seemed to promise rich sound.  And then he would instruct me (“Easy, now, Clarence.  Go easy.”) as I reached down into the deep recess of the cabinet, smelling the polished wood, placing the hole in the record carefully onto the protruding spindle; and then the critical part which, or so it seemed to me at the time, required surgical precision – I would place the turntable’s needle on the edge of the LP, and success would be met with that small hissing sound and then the first exhilarating notes of Ray Charles or Floyd Cramer or Duke Ellington…but failure was mortifying, that awful pop and scratch as the needle skidded across the record’s grooves… and the expression on my father’s face.

Plugging in an IPod just doesn’t do it for me, I guess.

Anyway, that’s the way things look from my corner of the café.

 -         G. Clarence Whippington

G. Clarence Whippington

I have always been interested in manners – from whence they derive, their meaning, and what they say about our society.
If someone from my grandmother’s era could ride in Wells’s Time Machine to the present day, he would no doubt conclude that our nation is barbaric, and in decline. It is unfortunate enough that most husbands fail to open the car door for their wives, but my friend Smedley oftentimes hops behind the wheel, revs up his old Pontiac, and goes sailing down the road, oblivious to the sad fact that he has left his spouse standing on the front stoop. Once he arrived at a restaurant, and was making his way toward the entrance when, from the corner of his eye, he saw something strange clinging to his passenger side door. It was his wife’s glove, wedged into the handle – he had ripped it from his her hand just as she was grasping it to get in!
Now, certainly Smedley is exceptionally inattentive, but such was not the case with the young man I observed only last month on the campus of an eminent university in our fair town. I was to deliver a speech on the English language at the college’s lecture hall (as I sometimes still do, even though I am retired from the academic life). I was huffing and puffing up the steps to the hall when this thoughtless young fellow passed me quickly, flung open the door, and let it slam emphatically in my face just as I approached. I had a large metal coffee thermos in my left hand and a bulky briefcase in my right, and I chose to set down the briefcase in order to open the door, and when I did, naturally the case toppled over, spilling its contents. At that instant, a great breeze sprang up (one of those warm, subtropical winds we ordinarily relish here) and scattered the pages of my lecture, which I had spent many hours preparing, across that verdant campus, like the demented thoughts of some madman.
I spent the better part of that afternoon (it was a two-hour slot) babbling – incoherently, I am sure – about the second-generation Romantic poets, as one hundred and fifty bewildered faces stared at me as if I were speaking in some strange tongue. And to add to my woes, roughly six months later, I read an article in a literary journal, written by my great rival, Sir Brumley Feckenthal, which had a familiar ring to it. I suddenly realized that it was the text of my lecture, word for word. Some literary adventurer had obviously found my pages, somehow pieced them together, and peddled them on the academic black market. What chagrin I suffered! Small consolation that it was a fine piece of writing indeed.
All of this is merely to illustrate my point: that the well-mannered person is a rare bird in these times. Still, it would be unfair should I fail to relate an anecdote concerning Jorge Lavender, Patron Saint of Coffee in the San Marco District. Lovely man, he was one of the great gentlemen I have ever known. Every morning of my life for weeks on end, I would arrive at my favorite café on the square, and there would be Jorge Lavender’s broad, smiling face, like an omelet with a cantaloupe smile.
“Ah, Professor Whippington, our best customer!” he would say. Then he would pull a chair out for me at my favorite table. Then he would trot off to fetch me an extra-large mug of steaming House Blend with whipped cream.
“On the house, as always,” he would say. Then he would fetch his own mug, sit down with me, and regale me for about an hour with amusing tales of his boyhood in Puerto Rico. Then he would rise, saying, “Well, back to work!” and he would disappear through the kitchen door.
Then, oddly enough, one sunny morning, he was not there to greet me. I asked the girl at the register,
“Where is that lovely owner of yours today, Jorge Lavender?”
She looked at me blankly. “Owner? That man is not the owner. Our owner’s name is Johnson.”
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Jorge Lavender is the owner. He told me so himself. He has been treating me to a free cup of coffee every day for quite a long time now.”
“But sir,” she said, “the gentleman you refer to told us that he is an associate of yours and that, in fact, you have been buying his coffee! We have been running a business account for you for eight months now.”
“Eight months! What do you mean, business account? I am a retired professor of literature.”
She shrugged her shoulders, but enlightenment was breaking across my dull mind. I said: “I say, I think that I’ve been had. What is the total on this business account?”
She tapped at her calculator. “One hundred fifty-three dollars and thirty-seven cents,” she said.
However, I was lucky. I never did get to see Jorge Lavender again, but Johnson, the real owner, agreed to let me pay the bill in monthly installments with no interest.
I thought that was very well-mannered of him.

In any event, that’s how things look from my corner of the café.

By G. Clarence Whippington