#66: Behold the Humble Letter
https://substack.com/@randysrants
One of the oldest mementos I have of my family’s past is a letter written by one of my ancestors to “my dearest wife” in 1872, telling her when he would be back home from the State Legislature. It included instructions to his sons on chores to do around the farm in Southern Missouri.
Letters used to be a part of everyday life. Now they are an almost extinct form of communication. If you are under fifty years old, odds are you have never written or received a letter. My mother saved all the letters she wrote — twice a day ― to her mother while she was in the Navy in World War II. She also saved all the letters she exchanged with my father as he fought with the Army from North Africa to Italy in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. I once sneaked a peak at the letters thinking I would find some noteworthy historical information. Instead, I was scandalized by their passionate, love sick language. Parents aren’t supposed to be passionate! How embarrassing. And my mother and I exchanged weekly letters until she died. She patiently typed hers out on an ancient 1952 Smith Carona typewriter. I don’t think she ever sent or received an e-mail in her whole life. The oldest letters are written in cursive. A writing form that is now the equivalent of hieroglyphics.
I am part of the generation that began with the ancient art of letter writing and ended up communicating with e-mail and the internet. I still have letters written to me from a girlfriend I acquired while bumming around Europe in 1972. I don’t have the letter another girlfriend sent dumping me and setting me on a path that led to a locked ward at a mental hospital. She ended it because she was rich and wanted to stay that way, while I wanted to save the world. Those goals were incompatible, she said. Forget Marx. She taught me that the rich run things because they have class consciousness. All the rest of us are barking at the moon.
Then the internet and digital communications swept the world, and the letter, a form of communication that had lasted for centuries, disappeared as quickly as plow horses disappeared before the tractor.
As the newest shiny object in a consumer-centered economy, its triumph was certain. The smartphone became not only ubiquitous, but a necessity. Then there was the rise of social media with the first Twitter accounts. Everything and everybody was connected to everything and everybody else. Not only were communications and commerce revolutionized, but politics and how people related to one another were turned upside down as well — for the better and for the worse. The digital age has not only revolutionized the future. It is also erasing the past. Historians and academics have always hunted through archives for letters that revealed the inner lives of their subjects. Future scholars will not have that opportunity.
Debate about the topics and issues of the day is now carried on digitally, anonymously, and with algorithms that promote conflict, invective, and extremism. Social media, to paraphrase the original Shawnee word for Kentucky, has become a dark and bloody ground where Americans hack and chop at each other. Editorialists and the breathless boosters of the newest, new thing, predicted that the digital age would be a force for human liberation and understanding.
They neglected to mention the liberation of criminal enterprise and government surveillance. Conmen and criminal enterprises from Russian dirty tricksters to digital cafés across the digital universe have feasted on new opportunities for illegal gain. Meanwhile Big Brother is everywhere. Instead of the telescreens of Orwell’s 1984, we carry Big Brother in our pockets and purses. Big Brother is your friendly, indispensable smartphone. Finally, we have AI, a new species of digital animal that raises the fear that it may take our jobs, take our minds, and gently nudge us into extinction. Now war has been digitized and carried into battlefields with drones. How lucky for us! My worst nightmare is that AI may decide that it doesn’t need us monkeys anymore and will gain access to the nuclear launch codes that us monkeys think we control. Silly monkeys. Bye-bye!
As a headline to an essay in the New York Times put it, “When we started to suspect that the Internet was not our friend.” Now people are not only afraid that AI will take our jobs, but we fear that smartphones will turn our children into brain-stunted zombies. Our electrical utilities have suddenly become more expensive, but they have a new master snapping the whip. Not the utility investors or the consumers, but the insatiable power demands for the AI infrastructure, which reminds us of the Mean Green Mother from Outer Space, who incessantly demands, “Feed me! I am hungry!” in Little Shop of Horrors. The pleasant farm field next to your suburban development? It is now occupied by huge data centers that are like the invading Martian spacecraft in the War of the Worlds.
Another great fear is that of isolation and loneliness in our society. The Covid epidemic revealed our sad solitude. I remember the heart-breaking items in the news of the elderly who lived alone and died alone from Covid without anyone noticing their absence. The internet has created a non-tactile world, whose inhabitants hunger for the simple touch of another person. Now there is a new trend of people forming romantic relationships with Chatbot lovers. Add this to the news that the sex life of young adults, a cohort that partied hearty in my youth, has plummeted. In the future, people in their older years will not even be able to smile at the memory of the naughtiness of their youth. No one will remember with fondness an encounter with a Chatbot lover. At least I hope not!
I always think of something we saw while on vacation in the Adirondacks. We were at one of our favorite diners in Saranac Lake, and noticed a family gathered at a table across the room from us. The family consisted of a mother, father and two teenage daughters. They were not talking with one another. They were not looking at each other. They were focused on their smartphones.
I have a small suggestion to make. A small act of rebellion. A subtle form of subversion aimed at the wired Lords who rule over our lives. Write a letter. I don’t do it myself often, but once a year around Christmas I send a letter bringing far flung friends an update on what we have been up to during the previous year. I also send one to my one remaining college friend who lives in the Bay Area, and who I only see once a decade. The response is universal. People love receiving a letter. They love the tactile feeling of holding a piece of paper in their hands. A piece of paper that you took time to write, fold and put in an envelope, address, stamp, and mail. All of which have minute finger prints or cells of skin, or moisture from your lips on them. Like a kiss. It doesn’t take much. It can be just one paragraph, or a couple of pages, but call it a small act of resistance. Every little bit helps to keep us and the letter alive. — Randy Cunningham
Remember, kids. Only you working with others can smash fascism. Do something special today. Write your representatives and tell them wimping out will not do. Abolish ICE ― no ifs, ands or buts. It can’t be reformed. Abolish it. — RJC
Randy Cunningham
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