Recently in Things That Suck About Living in the 21st Century Category

FAIR WARNING TO MY MORE SENSITIVE READERS: The following entry recounts something deeply unpleasant that happened to me a few nights ago. I posted a highly condensed form of this story already on my Facebook page, but it's still bothering me, and I want to discuss it in more detail. And -- here's where the warning comes in -- I've chosen to render it as accurately as my fallible, sleep-deprived, middle-aged human memory permits, which means I'm not going to pull any punches in the foul language department. I'm not talking the little four-letter swears we all learned in the third grade, either. No, this story involves the big two-dollar vulgarities, the kind that start fistfights (as, indeed, they were intended to here), as well as the unsavory spectacle of a couple of grown men acting like ten-year-olds. I'm not proud of my own role in this nastiness, even though I was just giving back what I got. The whole thing actually shook me pretty hard, which is why I'm still thinking about it three days later, and why I'm going to blog about it now. Anyhow, yeah... nasty words and poor behavior below the fold. Consider yourself warned.

One of the more depressing aspects of living in the current epoch, at least for me, is a nagging sense that the days of the Great Adventure are over. What do I mean by this? Consider: throughout much of the 20th century, larger-than-life men and women were constantly pushing the boundaries of how far, how high, and how fast human beings could go, either making or contributing to extraordinary scientific discoveries along the way, and all with the full attention and support of the general public. Viewing the popular movies and newsreels of decades past, and reading the contemporary pulp fiction (which I believe is often more representative of a particular milieu than the "good" stuff), you can really feel the shared sense of excitement ordinary joes must have vicariously experienced as daring aviators flew solo across the Atlantic for the first time, then circumnavigated the globe by plane, then broke the sound barrier and ventured to the edge of outer space; as intrepid explorers uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun and located the legendary city of Macchu Picchu high in the mountains of South America; as hardy adventurers reached the poles and summited Mount Everest; and ultimately, as astronauts first stepped onto the surface of another planetary body. The word "progress" meant something unambiguously positive then, and it must've seemed to folks living in those heady times as if the human race was really going... well, somewhere. I personally came along a little too late to share in that zeitgeist firsthand, but even in my own youth during the 1970s and '80s, I recall the public imagination being captured by the early space shuttle launches, by the first untethered spacewalk by an astronaut with a jetpack, and by Dr. Robert Ballard's discovery of the most famous shipwreck in history, RMS Titanic, lying in the silent darkness two-and-a-half miles below the surface of the ocean.

Nowadays, though... things are different now. Here in the second decade of the 21st century, every square foot of the Earth's surface has been mapped and photographed from orbit. Ancient cities lost for centuries in desert sands and steaming jungles can be pinpointed from air-conditioned rooms in anonymous suburban office parks using thermal imaging satellites. Any place on the globe can be reached by air in a matter of hours. African safaris and Everest hikes are vacation destinations for those who can afford them. And even distant worlds are accessible to the human race as never before, via our robot proxies and the information-sharing power of the Internet. And that's all good, it really is. Many of those early adventurer/explorers I romanticize met with pitiful and/or horrific deaths because they had to be there in person, and the folks back home never got more than just a glimpse of the sights they saw and things they learned. Today, technology has made discovery much safer, and it's made it truly democratic as well -- everyone can view the latest photos from the Hubble telescope or the surviving Mars rover, or zoom in on some section of the globe at the click of a mouse. People can even participate if they like, though projects like SETI@home. But the trade-off, unfortunately, and the irony as well, is that just at the moment when the average citizen can become more involved in this sort of thing than ever before, not many people seem to care anymore. Exploration and discovery seem to have become, at least as far as I can tell, a niche enthusiasm that attracts a relative few, rather than a society-wide concern.

Why else would there have been so little apparent interest three weeks ago when James Cameron -- yes, that James Cameron, the writer/director of Titanic, Avatar, and, somewhat prophetically, The Abyss -- joined the ranks of the great explorers by riding a revolutionary new submersible to the bottom of Challenger Deep, the very deepest point in all of Earth's oceans? To my mind, this was a Big Damn Deal. The sort of thing that strangers on trains should've been talking about for days afterwards, worthy of front-page articles and magazine covers. Instead, it seems to have been a mere blip on the cultural radar, duly noted and then shoved aside with the turn of another 24-hour news cycle. There are follow-up stories out there, but you have to seek them out if you're interested. And my inner cynic can't help but wonder with a sour grumble just how many of the mouth-breathers walking around out there actually are interested. Neither he nor I like the odds much.

To be fair to the mouth-breathers, though, a big chunk of the blame for the indifference that surrounded this story must be thrown at the media. There wasn't much news about Cameron's plans beforehand -- I myself only heard about the expedition by chance a couple weeks prior, via the blog Boing Boing, if I remember correctly -- and, as I said, the coverage of the actual dive has been perfunctory at best. I guess a good old-fashioned adventure is just not that important at the moment, not when there's an endless race for the Republican presidential nominee to focus on, and hey, did you hear Snooki's pregnant, and of course Facebook just bought Instagram, whatever the hell that is. If people who don't follow certain types of blogs aren't hearing about expeditions like Cameron's, why should they care?

I also wonder if perhaps part of the problem is James Cameron himself. My mother's reaction when I told her about the expedition was something to the effect of, "Why him?" And I imagine that's not an unusual reaction. He's a filmmaker, after all, not any sort of scientist (although the National Geographic Society has named him an explorer-in-residence, and he's made over 70 deep submersible dives in the last couple decades, which I think qualifies him for this). That "king of the world" thing at the 1998 Oscars still sticks in some people's craws, and he has a reputation for being a royal son-of-a-bitch to work with. But hey, let's be honest: I think a certain degree of arrogance is probably a requirement to doing something like this. You have to believe that the thing can be done, and you have to believe you're the one who can do it, and both require a sizable belief in oneself. In this case, Cameron wasn't the first human to journey into the Challenger Deep -- two men did it in 1960 with the help of the U.S. Navy and a submersible "bathyscaphe" called the Trieste -- but he is the first to do it in 52 years, and the first to do it solo. And the conditions he knew he'd be facing were pretty daunting, even with a half-century of technological advancement since the Trieste.

Cameron's submarine, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, dropped seven miles straight down into the Pacific Ocean, the downward journey taking close to three hours while his six-foot-plus body was folded into a steel sphere only 43 inches in diameter. The pressure outside grew to an astonishing 16,285 pounds per square inch -- barely less than the pilot sphere's rated capacity of 16,500 psi -- pressure so intense that the sub actually shrank in height by a couple of inches. Meanwhile, the temperature inside Cameron's sphere fell from uncomfortably warm near the surface (because of the electronics and Cameron's own body heat in such a confined space) to meat-locker cold at the bottom of the sea. And of course it was pitch black at the bottom. He was all alone in utter darkness farther below sea-level than Mount Everest rises above it, trusting that the engineers who designed and built DEEPSEA CHALLENGER hadn't overlooked anything. In other words, this situation was very much like a flight into space... and as much as I admire astronauts for their drive and guts, I admire James Cameron for his.

The Sunday he went down, March 25, I was following along on Twitter, a service I normally find rather silly, but that day it was the only place I could find any news. I was on the edge of my seat as each new update came in from the expedition, ticking off the latest depth he'd reached, the time elapsed since he'd submerged, etc. And when Cameron's own tweet flashed across the Internet -- "Just arrived at the ocean's deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good. Can't wait to share what I'm seeing w/ you" -- I exhaled a breath I didn't know I'd been holding, and thought of the words of Charlie Duke, the CAPCOM on the Apollo 11 mission, when Neil Armstrong radioed back that the Eagle had landed: "Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot." (Sidenote: How bizarre is it to think that a man was able to send a "tweet," surely one of the most frivolous means of communication ever invented, from the bottom of the ocean? We really are living in the future, aren't we?)

One of my favorite ways of disposing of my allowance when I was a kid was a comic book called The Micronauts. It was based on a line of imported Japanese toys -- Loyal Readers of a certain age may remember them -- and, like pretty much everything else around that time, it was heavily influenced by Star Wars, in particular by the Star Wars comics that were being published by the same company, Marvel. Despite its derivative elements, though, Micronauts quickly established its own rich identity. Its pages were filled with all sorts of wild ideas and concepts: another universe nestled within our own at a sub-microscopic level; a brave space explorer whose body spent 1,000 years in suspended animation while his conscious mind, merged with that of his robot co-pilot, traveled to the literal edge of their universe; and the decadent, violent society they returned to, where the rich and powerful prolonged their lives to near-infinity by replacing worn-out body parts with components harvested from the poor. It was all pretty heady stuff for a ten-year-old living in a sleepy little town in parochial old Utah, and it left a big impression.

Micronauts ran for five years, 1979 to 1984, resulting in 59 regular issues and two double-length "annuals." Remarkably, all of those issues save one were written by the same man, a guy named Bill Mantlo. Even more remarkably, Mantlo was simultaneously scripting all the issues for another toy-based comic, Rom Spaceknight, as well as contributing to other titles such as The Incredible Hulk, Spectacular Spider-Man, Thor, and Iron Man, a simply amazing level of productivity. By the late '80s, however, Mantlo was pretty well finished with comics; he left the industry, reinvented himself, and shortly became one of the great "where are they now?" mysteries from the pop culture of that era.

Earlier this week, I learned the fate of Bill Mantlo, and it isn't pretty. In 1992, he was struck by a car while rollerblading. It was a hit-and-run; the driver has never been found. Mantlo survived, but honestly it would've been better for him if he hadn't. He sustained massive brain injuries and was left severely impaired, both mentally and physically. But the accident was only the beginning of the real nightmare for Mantlo and his family. Although he made significant progress in his early rehabilitation, his insurance company soon started balking at the cost of the rehab, pressuring Mantlo's brother Mike -- who has been handling his affairs since the accident -- to find cheaper and cheaper facilities. Finally, the insurer decreed -- contrary to the opinions of doctors, mind you -- that further rehab was "unnecessary." Mantlo was cut off altogether. Mike was forced to liquidate everything Bill owned to qualify him for Medicare, and today Bill Mantlo, once such a prolific and creative force to be reckoned with, is warehoused in a geriatric nursing home in Queens, the only place his family could afford to send him. He is penniless and helpless. What progress he'd once made toward recovery has entirely dissipated without continuing therapy. His quality of life is essentially nonexistent. He is simply waiting to die.

That's the executive summary; you can read all the details here. It's a long article, but it's well worth your time, and I highly recommend that you read it and ponder it. Consider it a cautionary tale of how thoroughly a human life can be destroyed, short of death itself. And keep in mind that Bill Mantlo was one of the "lucky" ones. He had health insurance.

For me, this sad story constitutes just one more outrageous piece of evidence that the way we handle healthcare in this country is seriously broken. Conservative politicians scared a lot of people silly a couple years ago by claiming that a single-payer health system would lead to rationing of care and so-called "death panels," but what was Bill Mantlo subjected to if not rationing? And what were the faceless, implacable bureaucrats who decided his fate if not the equivalent of those dread death panels? Actually, they were worse than a "death" panel, because they condemned him not to death itself, but to a lingering, living hell until he finally gets around to dying. And they made that decision entirely on how much he was going to cost them, not whether he was responding to care or was still capable of improvement. If the United States truly is, as I've always been told, the richest country on earth, the best country on earth, how can we in good conscience abandon a human life in this way? The dirty truth behind our for-profit insurance industry is that insurers are more concerned with the dividends of their shareholders than the needs of their policy holders. People carry insurance as a hedge against anything really bad ever happening to us, but if anything really bad does happen, the insurance companies fight like hell to not actually help you, and that is just wrong. No... it's obscene. Our society's treatment of the long-term ill isn't quite as perverted as what Bill Mantlo imagined in the pages of The Mirconauts, i.e., Baron Karza's evil body banks, but in my book, it is just about as cruel and inhumane. I wish more people could see that and agree to change it.

Walking to the office from the train today, I noticed a workman refreshing the paint on some traffic-barrier poles near my building. The poles were glistening in the strengthening morning sunlight, and there were signs taped to the pavement around them warning off the unwary who might brush against them. Something about this scene was so reminiscent of the television fantasies of urban life I'd been exposed to as a very small boy -- think Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and about a billion cop shows set in the gritty decay of '70s-vintage New York -- that I couldn't help but smile. But then I noticed something weird about those warning signs. One of them read "Almost Dry Paint," which seemed like an unnecessarily specific descriptor. And then the sign next to the pole the man was still slathering with Battleship Gray read "Undry Paint."

"Undry?" It's bad enough that we now apparently feel it necessary to define different categories of wetness, but "Undry?" Really? Is that even a word? Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned clarity -- not to mention concision -- of "Wet?" Seriously, what could be more straightforward and absolutely not in need of elaboration than the traditional phrasing related to the transferability of newly applied paint? What the hell is wrong with the 21st century anyhow? It almost like society is adopting the foolishly complex language of the Coneheads and saying things like "electric incandescent illumination unit" instead of "lamp," because, oh I don't know, we're living in the future or something, and everyone knows that people in the future speak in pointlessly convoluted ways. Because it's the future, man. Arg.

I've been thinking for a while now that I really ought to start a new series of curmudgeonly rants here on Simple Tricks called "Things That Suck About Living in the 21st Century." Now, to be fair, this is a pretty amazing time we find ourselves in. We have technologies and luxuries undreamed of only a few decades ago: we can carry thousands of songs around on objects the size of a pack of smokes (or smaller, depending on the model); DVDs and hi-def TVs are a boon for movie fans (although they arguably come at the price of losing -- or at least drastically transforming -- the communal theater-going experience); the InterWebs give joe-schmoes like me a public forum to talk about any damn thing we wish, as well as a means of tracking down all those obscure Star Wars collectibles we missed out on as children; and the new Dodge Charger is a pretty damn nice-looking car. (That last one was for Anne; enjoy, honey!)

But there are also a lot of stupid little annoyances these days, stuff that can only be explained as a result of somebody, somewhere, abandoning all common sense. It's like some evil, shadowy cabal somehow gained control over the workings of our society and decided to redesign all those everyday items and mundane procedures that used to work just fine for the express purpose of driving people crazy.

My first example: cash register receipts.