One Of Those “You Had To Be There” Days

     I saw this episode of The Twilight Zone when I was very young:

     Rod Serling’s ominous forewarning sounded strange to my nine-year-old ears. What was all this about? Wasn’t this America? Weren’t we free? Why was Serling showing us this grayscale depiction of a man stripped of… well, of everything, and cautioning us against The State? For that matter, what was The State?

     There was something irresistibly compelling about it, even so. The idea that a man might ever be deemed “obsolete” and put to death for that reason was frightening. Of course, if you didn’t have the good sense to be murdered or killed in an auto accident, you would eventually be executed; I already knew that much. But still… just because he was a librarian and there were no longer any books?

     Yes, a nine-year-old can miss such a point. Even a bright one. But that was one of the consequences of schooling. The schools had already been turned into transmission belts for authoritarianism and submission to The State. My Catholic grammar school was no exception. The Dominican nuns that taught us made sure of it.

     I’ve read that network censors subjected Serling to heavy pressure to “omit the social commentary.” He resisted in the cleverest way: he resorted to indirection. He used allegory and allusion. But surely some of the viewers of “The Obsolete Man” were sufficiently penetrating to grasp his point.

     Apparently not enough of them. America has slid so far toward the pole depicted in “The Obsolete Man,” and the inculcation of reflexive submission to “authority” has gone so deep, that it’s self-evident that Serling’s warning fell on deaf ears. The mushrooming mass media of the Fifties and Sixties did their jobs well.

     It’s not that long ago that an acquaintance, puzzled by some of my views, actually said that “government is a force for good.” He said that in just those words, Gentle Reader. He quoted Saint Paul to that effect. He was certain that totalitarian excrescences such as the Third Reich or the Soviet Union were outliers. After all, Americans are free! We can see all the good things The State does with our own eyes… can’t we?

     That man was an engineer, a coworker of mine. Plainly, intelligence has little to do with one’s susceptibility to propaganda.

     Perhaps I should close here, call it a day, and go back to studying the buttons in my new-old Chrysler Pacifica. I have to figure out how to disable this “Engine Stop-Start” thing first. The C.S.O. tells me it’s a federal mandate, that all car makers have to put it in new vehicles now. Then there’s the permit application for the shed to be filled out. I also have to pay the fine for putting my garbage cans out too early the day before trash pickup. Ah, the joys of suburban living!

     Have a nice day.