Have mercy on my frail soul, here I am in Las Vegas for the fifth straight year covering the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the digital Bacchanal that invades this fair city every January. Thirty-five hundred exhibitors are here to hype things that go beep in the night and, as usual, either bigger or smaller carries the day. Big as in 3D HDTV's in man-sized formats, small as in tablets that are fast usurping the popularity of netbooks and smaller laptops. If it's medium-size, forget it, nobody's interested!
More on all these technological marvels later, but for now let's look at the Latin root of that much bandied-about word "consumer." Of course it derives from the verb, to consume, which back in Caesar's day meant to burn up, destroy, devour or waste. Hmm, irony abounds here, it seems to me. Could it be that we've come full circle from the days when consuming meant laying a field of wheat to waste, then grinding it, mixing with with water and salt and turning it into our daily bread? Nice organic process, that.
Contemporary consumers don't create and then destroy in the name of sustenance, they simply wait at the end of the assembly line and find out what the great minds have defined as their next set of needs, which on the surface, appear boundless. Who'd have ever thought we couldn't go five minutes without calling someone, texting them, or worse, sending them a picture of your dessert from a restaurant? While there are obvious advantages in living in a connected world, I am always awestruck when leaving a movie theater at how many people's heads are turned down to their cellphones immediately thereafter. Omigod, what have I missed?
It used to be when you left such an experience that you'd pause to reflect upon or even discuss the fictional world you'd just suspended your disbelief for. Nowadays, instead of parsing the peculiarities of the plot or dissecting an actor's performance, the entire experience is likely reduced to a truncated Tweet, the modern-day equivalent of haiku, but without the deliberation or soulfulness of that pithy poetry. Trying to communicate nuance and emotion in 140 characters reminds me of that old maxim about translation: When translating poetry, one loses only one thing — the poetry! We moderns have sacrificed subtlety for speed, brain-labor for brevity. As Samuel Johnson said, "language is the dress of thought," which in our age means we parade about naked! Language has been reduced to abbreviation, not elucidation.
It is only fitting that the CES extravaganza takes place here in Las Vegas, which I like to call the most venal city in the most venal nation in the most venal civilization mankind has yet produced. Built by mobsters with dirty money purloined from the Teamsters Central States Pension and Welfare Fund half a century ago, it is now a neon-glowing testimony to ill-gotten gain, garish entertainment and unregulated capitalism gone bananas. The foreclosure rate here is five times the national average and no sign of relief is in sight.
You want real entertainment, albeit scary and depressing, rent a copy of American Casino, a documentary examining the greed and law-breaking behavior our cherished financial institutions engaged in that led to our current debacle. No amount of blinking geegaws can assuage the pain of living in a world where trust and probity are hoary archaisms. More to come from Babylon later.....