"Eutopia"

A Proposal: Could we all just agree that, in general parlance, "utopia" (Little Tommy More's coinage from Gk. ou- "not" + topos "place") has come to mean "A Really Super Nice Place," and has shed its original meaning, "Not a Place At All Because It's an Impossible Ideal," BUT that when coupled with "dystopia," as in this recent NYT book review, it should be spelled "eutopia"?

This isn't a proposal based on logic, because "utopia" has essentially been used to mean "eutopia" for almost 400 years now, thus under this proposal we'd have two words, "utopia" and "eutopia," running around meaning the same thing.

But isn't that the case as it is now anyway? "Eutopia" is a "real" word*, after all, even if seldom used. And don't "eu" and "dys" always make a lovely couple on the page?

*BTW, the top two Google results on a search of "eutopia" are (1) a site for pornographic movies, and (2) Eutopia, "a Lay Journal of Catholic Thought."

Desideratum

Think your life is tough? Put yourself in the shoes of the NYT reader who identifies with this introductory sentence from Sunday's travel section:

"If you go to great lengths to choose the perfect vacation spot and a hotel that offers everything from a pillow menu to a flawless view, it can be somewhat dispiriting to arrive at the car rental lot and slide behind the wheel of a generic four-door sedan."

Now that's a heartbreaker: the indignity and shame of driving a generic four-door sedan! And while on vacation, no less!

Keep this hardship in mind, dear readers, the next time your child is hospitalized or your landlord evicts you. At least you're not driving a Corolla!

(My apologies to those of you who do, like me, drive a Corolla. Last year, my wife had the audacity to donate her old Mazda Protege to the American Lung Association. Our apologies now go to the recipient; we didn't mean to dispirit you.)

Joe the Plumber

Sunday morning, I discovered a puddle of water on the downstairs bathroom floor. A steady tick, tick, tick behind the wall suggested that either (a) we had a leaky pipe, or (b) our house's innards had become home to an incontinent analog clock.

The plumber, who couldn't come out until Tuesday, was a jolly, foul-mouthed fellow named Joe who appeared to fix the problem pipe through the sheer force of his mumbled profanity. Upon learning that I was to become a father, Joe congratulated me and confided that he was soon moving up to Delaware, to a place out in the country. "Why're you moving up there?" I asked, gently concealing my jealousy. (Delaware does sound nice: The Shore! The Fields! The Change of Seasons!) "Well, we got us a daughter, and after she's been hangin' out with those Spanish girls and Haitian girls and Cuban girls.... Well, you know what I mean. Up there, they're all like us!" (laughs)

Joe was looking at his plumbing handiwork in the wall as he said this, thus he missed the sudden dimming of the friendly sparkle in my Aryan eyes. I can't remember the last time I'd been in the presence of such casual, cozy racism. I didn't engage Joe in a discussion about how his use of the phrase "like us" is narrow-minded bigotry: defining who's "us" and who's "like" us is something all human beings do, but skin color and national origin are completely unreliable factors in that process. Didn't he know that? Didn't he care that he's dismissing out of hand whole swaths of humanity whose qualities are, in every salient respect, identical to his own? And to his daughter's?

I felt terrible as I paid the bill. Am I fostering further racism by not telling Joe that I think he and I are not, in fact, alike in the way he seems to believe is important? Am I a hypocrite for accepting his plumbing services, while any non-white customers of his may receive inferior service?

The lawyer part of my home-repair-addled brain pipes in: "Well, you don't know that he's treated other customers differently because of their race or national origin. Moreover, he's part of a national company (Roto-Rooter), which charges a flat fee for this sort of repair. Thus, there's no room for race to enter into it; your white guilt is misplaced here. Pay the man and see him out."

I'll try a different plumbing service next time, but that's probably where this will end. Joe didn't say anything that Roto-Rooter should be alerted about: his remarks to me couldn't constitute a cause of action under the law or under a company's personnel policies. But it left me feeling icky, hypocritical, and a bit out to sea. What will I do the next time I'm invited to express my allegiance to the White Man's Club? Will a dimming of the eye-sparkle and a stony silence be enough? (The Lawyer Mind pipes in again: "Who says there'll even be a next time? Racism, especially the overt kind, is on the way out, right? You just happened to hear Joe exhale one of racism's death-rattles. Just relax now and go watch some TV....Oh, look! That show featuring a cast of white people is on!")

Indeed.

Silly cells

NPR had a story this morning about "polite cell phones," phones that can learn your answering habits and thereby deduce when they should and should not ring. For example, once the phone learns to recognize the sound of your boss's voice near you, it'll know not to ring at that point because you're likely to be in an important discussion. (The picture at left illustrates the point: that's me, unwisely taking a call last month while my boss was in the middle of prattling on about my lackadaisical work performance and easy distractability. The call, which ended up costing me my job, was only from a pea stuck to the bottom of the can.)

Since a cell phone would have to be very, very smart indeed to know when the incoming call is more important than whatever's going on around you, researchers have proposed that such phones give each caller (1) information about your present situation, and then (2) a choice about whether to cause the phone to ring (e.g., the caller would hear, "He's [driving to the hospital/daydreaming about unicorns/arguing with a pea] right now. Would you like to interrupt?").

The problem, immediately apparent, is just how much information does one give out, and to whom? Does just anyone get to know that I'm at Border's leafing through this month's Ferret Fancy? Or do I allow one set of information to go to my boss ("He's wowing a client right now. Would you like to interrupt?") and another to my spouse ("He's sorry about the whole 'using the cat as a floormop' thing. Could you please just let it go?")?

What's most striking about the NPR piece is this comment from a developer at Motorola:

"If I could just know if my kids are safe, or if I could just know that my wife is thinking about me, or if I could just know that my parents are OK today, that would be a really cool application that I would love to have on my cellphone."

My goodness, that's epistemological ambition, indeed! Would that we could know all of these things at all times!

Somehow I don't think a cell phone is up to the task of eliminating harm and risk from our lives, which is, at base, what the "smart cell phone" makers are trying to develop and sell to us. Until those annoying physical laws about not being able to be in more than one place at one time are repealed, we can't always know what's up with our spatially-differentiated children and spouses and parents at a given moment. Just ask Schroedinger's cat.

Maybe Motorola has some pan-dimensional, quantum superstring spacetime-phone in development, but me, I'm sticking with my two tin cans on a string. That pea might call back with a job offer.