A Man Without a Country Read Online Free Page B

educated, well-fed, middle-class German businessmen and their families, who had money to invest. One ancestor on my mother’s side became a brewer in Indianapolis. But he didn’t build a brewery. He bought one! How was that for pioneering? Nor had these people had to play any part in the genocides and ethnic cleansing which had made this for them a virgin continent.
    And these guilt-free people, speaking English at work but German at home, built not only successful businesses, most strikingly in Indianapolis and Milwaukee and Chicago and Cincinnati, but their own banks and concert halls and social clubs and gymnasia and restaurants, and mansions and summer cottages, leaving the Anglos to wonder, with good reason, I have to say, “Who the hell’s country is this anyway?”



6
     
    I have been called a Luddite .
    I welcome it.
    Do you know what a Luddite is? A person who hates newfangled contraptions. Ned Ludd was a textile worker in England at around the start of the nineteenth century who busted up a lot of new contraptions—mechanical looms that were going to put him out of work, that were going to make it impossible for him with his particular skills to feed, clothe, and shelter his family. In 1813 the British government executed by hanging seventeen men for “machine breaking,” as it was called, a capital crime.
    Today we have contraptions like nuclear submarines armed with Poseidon missiles that have H-bombs in their warheads. And we have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming. Bill Gates says, “Wait till you can see what your computer can become.” But it’s you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.
    Progress has beat the heck out of me. It took away from me what a loom must have been to Ned Ludd two hundred years ago. I mean a typewriter. There is no longer such a thing anywhere. Huckleberry Finn , incidentally, was the first novel ever to be typewritten.
    In the old days, not long ago, I used to type. And, after I had about twenty pages, I would mark them up with a pencil, making corrections. Then I would call Carol Atkins, who was a typist. Can you imagine? She lived out in Woodstock, New York, which you know was where the famous sex and drugs event in the ’60s got its name from (it actually took place in the nearby town of Bethel and anybody who says they remember being there wasn’t there.) So, I would call up Carol and say, “Hey Carol. How are you doing? How is your back? Got any bluebirds?” We would chit-chat back and forth—I love to talk to people.
    She and her husband had been trying to attract bluebirds, and as you know if you have tried to attract bluebirds, you put the bluebird house only three feet off the ground, usually on a fence along a property line. Why there are any bluebirds left I don’t know. They didn’t have any luck, and neither did I, out at my place in the country. Anyway, we chat away, and finally I say, “Hey, you know I got some pages. Are you still typing?” And she sure is. And I know it will be so neat, it will look like it was done by a computer. And I say, “I hope it doesn’t get lost in the mail.” And she says, “Nothing ever gets lost in the mail.” And that in fact has been my experience. I never have lost anything. And so, she is a Ned Ludd now. Her typing is worthless.
    Anyway, I take my pages and I have this thing made out of steel, it’s called a paper clip, and I put my pages together, being careful to number them, too, of course. So I go downstairs, to take off, and I pass my wife, the photo journalist Jill Krementz, who was bloody high tech then, and is even higher tech now. She calls out, “Where are you going?” Her favorite reading when she was a girl was Nancy Drew mysteries, you know, the girl detective. So she can’t help but ask, “Where are you going?” And I say, “I am going out to get an