Rick's October Tirade
Extinction Reconsidered
A few weeks ago I was startled to read that the elusive
Ivory-Billed Woodpecker has finally been declared extinct. The
curtain has fallen, the players have withdrawn, the lights have gone
to black. The majestic Ivorybill shall not rise again, and this most
imperial of North American tree-bangers shall nevermore put beak to
bark. Its eloquently nasal "yank-yank" call will never
again pierce the dismal old-growth forests of deepest Dixieland. The
big bird with the swashbuckling red crest has gone and joined the
Dodo, the Heath Hen and the Carolina Parakeet in that great
celestial aviary for discontinued fowls.
The news shouldn't have surprised me, since the Ivorybill had
been teasing us with intimations of its possible demise for over
half a century. About fifteen years ago, a few stragglers had been
spotted in the emerald jungles of eastern Cuba but soon vanished
like a dream. The species sputtered out on an indefinite date, at an
indefinite location, unobserved and unlamented. Nobody was present
to see the last of the breed expire, the way the world watched and
mourned when Martha the Passenger Pigeon keeled over in her cage at
the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
No, the last of the Ivorybills vanished unceremoniously, like one
of those semi-anonymous functionaries in the accounting department
at work. One day you casually mention to a colleague, "I
haven't seen Marv Zinofsky lately; what's he been up to?" And
you're informed that poor Marv was sacked eleven months ago. So it
was with the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. The bird was sacked and nobody
bothered to throw a farewell party.
These quiet extinctions, without fanfare or public funerals,
always strike me as weirdly unsettling. One day you're sharing the
earth with certain birds, mammals, minor celebrities or brands of
breakfast cereal, and the next day they're secretly whisked out the
building like Marv Zinofsky. You don't notice their absence at
first, but eventually you start wondering. Whatever happened to
Maypo Instant Oatmeal, for example -- or My-T-Fine Pudding, Junket
Rennet Custard and Ipana Toothpaste? Are they still in our midst or
have they gone quietly extinct? What about milkmen and epic poets?
Is there still a pretender to the Polish throne? Can you still buy
snuff at the local tobacco store? If we searched hard enough in the
back-alleys of Paris, could we track down a live Bonaparte?
Extinction weighed heavily on my mind when I had lunch last week
with my old friend John K. at our favorite hole-in-the-wall
Allentown eatery. John, a freelance writer and former newspaperman,
is a neatly bearded, unreformed 1960s liberal AND a liberal arts
graduate. He regularly reads "The New Republic" and
refuses to own a computer or even a TV. In short, both of us are
proud holders of first-class seats on the Extinction Express.
For the past seven years, every one of our conversations has been
a merrily morose variation on the same theme: How much worse can it
get? We wouldn't have it any other way, and we always look forward
to the prospect of shaking our heads ruefully in each other's
presence. Call it the camaraderie of cultural pessimism.
This past week's lunch was no exception: After a suitably brief
discussion of Ronald Reagan's mind, the subject turned to the new
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, those youthful conquistadors of
cyberspace. I observed that their voracious minds carried no extra
ballast of civilization to weigh them down and sidetrack them from
their singleminded quests. Supremely streamlined, liberated from and
oblivious to the baggage of the past, indifferent to creature
comforts and social graces, they've reduced themselves to superbly
engineered machines for spotting and grasping opportunities. They're
the people of the future, I said -- the way we imagined the people
of the future when we were kids back in the fifties. Except that
they're not merely computer-smart and divorced from recognizable
human emotions, they're as ferociously aggressive as ferrets.
"Where does that leave people like us?" asked my friend
John K., who looked as if he already knew the answer. "We're
dinosaurs now," I said. "We're going to be as irrelevant
and obsolete as all those Victorian writers with three names."
"Like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?"
"Right, and John Greenleaf Whittier."
"James Whitcomb Riley."
"William Cullen Bryant."
"James Russell Lowell."
"Algernon Charles Swinburne. And those are just the ones we
remember. They're famously obsolete. We'll just be obscurely
obsolete. We're headed for extinction and nobody will notice."
After lunch I thought about all the ancient nations that
flourished for a time and ultimately vanished: the Sumerians,
Akkadians, Phoenicians, Urartians, Phrygians, Lydians, Cappadocians
and Paphlagonians... Medes, Hittites, Elamites, Midianites and
Canaanites. I dreamt of defunct dynasties that once held sway over
vast and fabulous dominions: the Achaemenids of Persia, the
Seleucids of Syria, the Ptolemies, Sassanians, Abbasids, Fatimids,
Carolingians, Hapsburgs, Ottomans and Romanovs. I recalled the dead
gods of the distant past: Ishtar, Baal, Isis and Osiris, Zeus,
Poseidon, Wotan, Thor and Quetzalcoatl. I remembered James Whitcomb
Riley and Junket Rennet Custard.
We're as finished as all of them, I thought. Men of letters, men
of whimsy, men of doom. We're pterodactyls. And like pterodactyls,
we'll be replaced by more efficient creatures who can fly into our
aerial niche and thrive where we plummeted.
It might be that, on some subconscious level, diehard liberal
artists like John K. and me REFUSE to thrive. We want no part of the
forced adaptation and mental streamlining that the brave new world
demands of us. We're damned if we're going to jettison our favorite
books and ideas to make ourselves more aerodynamic. And, of course,
we're damned if we don't.
I sometimes wonder if, given the chance to inhabit a more
congenial universe -- a world in which history majors reigned like
bespectacled pharaohs or at least enjoyed parity with corporate
supply-chain managers -- outmoded characters like John K. and me
could have flourished and borne ample fruit. Could we have been
contenders, had class, been somebody?
Maybe we're less like the hapless Dodo and more like the doomed
tigers and elephants of the world: fundamentally sound creatures
that had the misfortune to run up against a particularly nasty
strain of higher ape equipped with machetes and calculators. Unlike
more adaptive and accommodating folks, we're not inclined to say yes
to the future... not if it requires us to point and click constantly
for our livelihood... not if it means downsizing our cultural
memories from the past three millennia to the period since the
introduction of the microwave oven.
Saying no has its privileges, after all. While shunning a future
that shuns the past, we'll aspire to live out the remainder of our
years as enlightened lame-duck thinkers, fully resigned to
obsolescence but determined to enjoy that obsolescence to the
fullest. We'll read our books, possibly write a few, and always
grumble cheerfully about the latest cultural outrage that boils our
noodles. We'll be playful where others are merely productive. Like
old Diogenes the Cynic, we'll nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy
and bite scoundrels. We'll continue to stand up for truth, justice
and the subjunctive tense -- even if such obstinate and stiff-necked
resistance were to harden our arteries and severely deplete our
stock portfolios.
Is it worth sacrificing worldly success for a handful of archaic
ideals? Probably not, but when you've been given a first-class seat
on the Extinction Express, you quickly get into the spirit of the
journey. Most doomed things are doomed to vanish quietly, like Marv
Zinofsky in Accounting. Or the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. Or outmoded
concepts like nobility and electric toothbrushes. But we've resolved
to make a joyful noise before we go, so we're carousing with the
other passengers who have climbed aboard: the pandas and portrait
painters, manatees and moonwalkers, tigers and teachers of classical
Greek.
There's plenty of room aboard the Extinction Express, and we're
always looking for congenial company. Won't you join us?
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
