From: al677@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jerry Cosyn)
Subject: La Dolce Vita
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, (USA)
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 00:14:33 GMT


     Billy Green stretched groggily and groaned when the electronic
alarm clock/radio shrilled.   His coarse right hand batted the long wide
button that brought merciful silence.  He cast a sleep-veiled eye at the
digital display and muttered a hoarse and obscene monosyllable.  He
shouldn't have hit the snooze button so many times; now he'd have to
rush or he'd be late.  The digital clock read 7:00 am.
 
[It had taken hundreds of engineers, technicians, scientists and
laborers more than two decades and tens of millions of man-hours to
develop the theory, engineering and manufacturing techniques that
produced the tiny electronic devices inside the clock/radio; the digital
logic circuitry, LEDs, and transistors alone were masterful tributes to
man's ability to conceptualize and manipulate fundamental forces of
nature at the quantum level.  To Billy Green, the device was a necessary
pain-in-the-ass, for which he had paid eighteen dollars -- about one
hour's wage -- and which, for the past six years, had accurately told
him the time and awakened him for work five days a week.]
 
     Billy rolled from the waterbed and sighed his way to the bathroom,
relieved himself of the previous night's beer, and stepped into the
shower.  Clean hot water, easily adjusted to the temperature and
pressure he desired, poured over him, and he began to feel more awake
and alert.  He was tempted to linger in the shower, but knew he had no
time, so he reluctantly lathered himself with soap and shampoo, rinsed,
and dried himself on a large, freshly washed towel.  His electric razor
buzzed briefly, and he quickly brushed his teeth, of which he still had
all but one, despite being forty-two years old.
 
[Billy had only the vaguest notion of how modern plumbing worked, could
not have guessed to within five miles how far the water he showered in
had been pumped, had never had cholera nor dysentery, absolutely
despised the open pit toilets he occasionally used at the state park,
and had not the slightest idea how chlorine was manufactured.  The water
heater in his basement had not failed him in the ten years he'd lived in
that house, though it had heated thousands of gallons of water using
thousands of cubic feet of natural gas, which travelled hundreds of
miles to his home.  The chemical processes by which the components of
his toothbrush had been manufactured had taken decades to develop.
Billy had never seen or touched the primitive lye soap of his
grandparents' generation, and did not know that his grandfather had died
at the age of forty-eight as a result of a series of infections and
disease which had begun in his rotting gums.]
 
     Minutes later, dressed in clothing of various fabrics which were
comfortable, colorful and durable, Billy sat in the kitchen drinking a
cup of coffee which the automatic coffee maker -- which had cost him a
little over two hours' wages -- had prepared about the time he was
getting into the shower.  The morning newspaper, printed only hours ago
and delivered to his doorstep as he slept, was spread before him.  He
scanned the headlines, frowning and grunting to himself at the news that
government was catering to big business by allowing an increase in
electrical rates, was somewhat mollified when he saw on the next page
that the public-gouging electric company had again been denied
permission to construct a new nuclear power plant, and then turned to
the section in which he was most fervently interested: the astrology
column.
 
[Billy was completely ignorant of modern methods of planting, growing,
harvesting and processing cotton.  He could not guess within several
orders of magnitude the number of chemical processes involved in the
manufacture of modern fabrics, even those labeled "all natural".  He
knew that his coffee came from South America, though his knowledge of
geography was fuzzy at best.  He had never given any thought to the
manner by which coffee came to be in his local grocery store, and cared
nothing about shipping, ship building, ship yards, ports, trade routes,
railroad switchyards, highway construction, or the trucking industry.
He purchased food as he purchased clothing, accepting its ready
availability with a complete lack of wonder, as a kitten would accept a
bowl of milk placed under its nose.  Billy was unaware of how paper was
manufactured beyond his certainty that big corporations raped millions
of acres of trees with no thought for the future in the process.
Methods of printing and producing a modern newspaper were unknown to
him.  Of electricity he knew only that it was outrageously expensive,
and a necessity of life, and that someone should make the greedy utility
companies lower their ridiculous rates.  Of nuclear power (he pronounced
it "new-kyew-ler") he knew nothing other than that it was hideously
dangerous to all life on the planet, should never have been invented,
and would have been banned long ago had not the power companies used
their ill-gotten millions to bribe greedy and unscrupulous politicians.
He did not know that he had many times suffered mild radiation burns
from a nuclear reactor, and accepted sunburn as the perfectly natural
result of failing to spread easily obtained, inexpensive, chemically
produced sunscreen on his skin.]
 
     With the reassurance from the newspaper that Libras would survive
another day, that Saturn would have a strong influence on him in the
next week, and that he might expect an unexpected financial gain in the
next couple of days, Billy left the house, got into his two-year-old
car, and began the drive to work, with a favorite tape in the stereo and
the air conditioner pumping cool air into his enclosed environment.
 
[The steel in the car had been produced from ore and coal mined in areas
selected by satellite survey of an entire world.  Billy considered the
decades of the space program and rocketry research a waste of money
which should be spent on solving problems on earth.  The manufacture of
automobiles was an enormously complex operation, involving tens of
thousands of people and machines working at highly specialized tasks,
producing thousands of materials and products by the use of extremely
sophisticated technology.  Each of the material components had required
considerable intellectual effort to conceive and develop, and followed
from a long line of earlier invention and innovation.  Tens of millions
of cars drove over hundreds of millions of miles of roads each day,
conveying people like Billy to jobs which they would otherwise be unable
to hold, to places they would otherwise be unable to visit and to
entertainment they would otherwise never have experienced.]
 
     Billy cursed the traffic, the red lights which impeded his
progress, and the modern world which forced a man to live with such
hardships.  When at last he arrived at work, twelve minutes and seven
miles later, he parked the car and joined the throng of his fellow
workers flowing into the factory.
 
     Working conditions in the factory were unpleasant, it being a hot,
noisy, noxious smelling place, but Billy had to have a job and he was
unqualified for anything else.  He took solace in the company of his
friends during their union-mandated mid-morning break, and commiserated
with them over the injustice of a world where people such as themselves,
who did all the work and kept the company running, should receive a
pittance of an hourly wage, (plus overtime, insurance and benefits)
while the greedy bigshots sat in their ivory towers and made millions
off the sweat of other people's labors.
 
    At lunchtime, Billy enjoyed a conversation about the good old days,
when there were no factories and everybody farmed his own land and
people took care of each other, and a man could see the results of his
hard work.  They bemoaned the bygone era when there was no pollution or
chemicals or stress or traffic, and people worked with nature in natural
ways, and nobody worried about cholesterol levels or radiation poisoning
or the whole planet frying because the ozone layer was gone.  They
talked of "getting back to the land" and "good honest work" and barn-
raisings and "a sense of community".
 
[Billy had never worked on a farm.  He'd never plowed behind a mule for
fourteen hours in the sun, nor chopped enough wood to heat a house, nor
cooked on a woodstove.  He'd never depended on his own farming skills to
keep him alive, nor on the fickleness of the weather to grow him
sufficient food for the winter months.  He gave no thought to life
without indoor plumbing.  He'd never walked ten miles through snow to
summon a doctor for his croup-ridden child, only to find he'd returned
home to a tiny corpse and a grief-stricken wife.  He'd never seen a town
wiped out by smallpox.  Billy didn't know what ozone was, nor where it
came from, nor how many cubic miles of it cloaked the earth.  He'd have
been hard pressed to define what a cubic mile is.  He could not explain
what ozone did to ultraviolet light, nor why.]
 
    At the end of his shift, Billy slogged routinely through the ritual
of clocking out and walking to his car without really thinking about it.
He was already thinking ahead to stopping for a few beers with some of
his co-workers.  The conversation at the bar would be routinely bitter,
centering primarily on how the various bastards in charge were able to
screw up the world and make things harder for men like Billy Green.  It
being an election year, there would then follow the usual argument about
candidates, and which of them would be least likely to make things
worse.
 
    Then Billy would stop to eat on the way home.  Usually it was drive-
through fast food, which he ate in the car.  At home, he would watch
television for an hour or two, flipping channels at random until a laugh
track caught his attention, while he unwound with a few more beers.
 
     At the end of the evening, a tired Billy Green would tumble into
his heated waterbed, set the electronic alarm clock/radio with the
gentle touch of a finger, and surrender himself to unconsciousness, his
standard workday done.  It differed in no significant aspect from the
workday of his father, forty years before.
 
     One day, in fifteen or twenty years, Billy Green would retire.  He
would collect his pension checks and his Social Security each month and
take it easy, with beer and ballgames and his buddies.  The modern world
simply demanded too much of the workingman.  Billy Green looked forward
to living the good life.