what we have here is a failure to communicate

I am by no means a Luddite. In fact, I am one of those people who tend, after all this time, to be astounded by what technology can do. It still amazes me that I can write this and you can read it moments after from practically anywhere. I’m still blown away that Google has a picture of my house -- or at least the roof -- that you can look at by typing in my address, or that the information from my retina can be used as a security device.

I am, however, skeptical of technology for technology’s sake, and there are at least a few devices concocted over the last couple of decades I find troublesome and even downright sinister. Most of them have in common an underlying function: they are anti-communication devices. Even in our millennial telecommunications wonderland, where we can communicate with people from across the world and talk incessantly into cell phones, we haven’t stopped coming up with devices to neglect, ignore and disrespect the people with whom we interact face to face. Here are just a few that spring to mind:

Evil Anti-Communication Device #1: The knee defender. Have you heard of this thing? Next time you want to see me start frothing at the mouth and shouting long streams of obscenities, talk to me about the knee defender. This is a sort of lock you can apply to the airplane seat in front of you to prevent the passenger ahead of you from reclining his/her seat and painfully banging your knees.

I am not a tall person and riding for several hours in a crowded airplane is already unpleasant, so I can only imagine it’s next to impossible to be both tall and comfortable on an airplane. For this reason, if someone said to me, excuse me, I’m tall and sitting behind you, could you please refrain from reclining your seat, or at least warn me before you do, I feel I’d be sympathetic to that. Perhaps naively, I venture to say most people would be. If, on the other hand, I went to recline my airplane seat and found I had been foiled by a plastic tool from the Sharper Image section of SkyMall, I would be likely to come unglued and provoke the kind of full-blown confrontation the knee-defender was undoubtedly designed to avoid.

Because to me, the subtext communicated here is “I am tall and have no character, while you are not a person who can be or deserves to be reasoned with. Fortunately for me I can preempt your lack of consideration and restrict your right to use the airline equipment you’ve paid for – all without having to deal with you on a human level.” Lucky for tall people everywhere I can’t afford to travel very often. I think I need to go lie down.

Evil Anti-Communication Device #2: TVs in the car. Do you remember the first commercial about this, back in the nineties? Two young parents listening to their kids bickering in the back seat of the family minivan, then they pop in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and stick headphones on the kids? The camera pans to the backseat, where the children gape, slack-jawed, at the screen, while up front Mom and Dad exchange placid smiles.

Okay. Where to even begin with this one. People who talk on their phones and drive take their share of flak, but I’m worried more about the accident I’m going to get in because I’m tailgating somebody’s TV, trying to figure out which Murder, She Wrote episode the driver ahead of me is watching.

Independently of that, though, and call me old-fashioned, but I thought family road trips were supposed to be tedious, cranky affairs where children went for hours at a stretch without being entertained, without even the expectation of being entertained. The monotony of being in the car with one’s siblings and parents, charting the trip on the odometer, getting sick of waiting for a “La Quinta Inn” sign to get past the Q in the alphabet game, the rise and fall of interminable Indiana corn fields outside the window, that was all part of it. Subtext here? “Isn’t it great that we can plug the kids into the TV just like at home, so that we can continue to not talk to each other until we get to wherever it is we’re going to Spend some Quality Time All Together As a Family?”

Yecchh.

Evil Anti-Communication Device #3: Political correctness. Technically this is not a feat of technology, but still. I’m with Rhodesian author Doris Lessing about this one, and she knows from politically correct. For starters, it’s just real dumb to think you can slap a new name on something and change the underlying prejudices that created a sense of taboo about whatever it is in the first place. Any negative connotation attached to the out-going term will just bleed onto the new term until you change the underlying discourse. Meanwhile, you’ve often taken a perfectly good word out of circulation. In some cases, the topic being discussed is so politically, historically or emotionally charged that we burn through nouns and adjectives faster than anyone can keep up, and we all end up scrambling to remember whatever it is we’re supposed to call Polish people these days. Do you see what this notion is doing to our word-scape?

Amazing, too, how political correctness has a way of imposing a value judgment on topics that don’t warrant them, sparking off whole new prejudices. For instance, someone once said to me “you’re not short, you’re vertically challenged.” Until then, I had lived in a safe little bubble in which being short was acceptable, but clearly I was deluded. I should have been aspiring to be taller all along ( note: naturally I told this person I wasn’t “challenged”, merely “differently abled”).

In my book the worst part about political correctness is that it makes certain meddlesome and self-righteous people feel as though they’ve accomplished something for some misrepresented sector of society by changing the rhetoric the rest of us use to talk about them when they’re not around. It’s what allows me to continue doing nothing about the under-enrollment of urban blacks in U.S. universities, all the while feeling warm and fuzzy about tossing around the latest and greatest in hyphenated terminology and still excluding them from the dialogue.

In short, political correctness = gaytarded.

So there you have it, gentle reader. I’m givin it to you straight. If you don’t agree with me, you know, that’s cool. You can tell me so. Just do me one favor: use your words.