Humor – Page 158 – Splendid Isolation

Whenever I’m stuck to describe how I feel about something, I almost always resort to the classics, because every situation in modern times has occurred, sometimes often, in the past, and we’re just experiencing reruns.

I had to go to WalMart for an emergency purchase — they don’t sell gin, but they do sell tonic — and as I saw the usual tragic shoppers pawing through the worthless clothing, fall-apart utensils and cheap furniture, my mind wandered off to the tragedy of the current “pipeline” issues which are making people fearful that they won’t get the plastic toys for their kiddies in time for Xmas (not Christmas), or which are forcing people to wait an extra week for their must-have cheap kitchen appliances (avg lifetime: months, not years), and it stirred within my memory this immortal poem, written in 1902:

Cargoes
by John Masefield

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

Substitute “rusty Chinese container ship” for the dirty British coaster, and you have the modern take on the earlier perspective, in a nutshell.

Then I heard on the radio some guy moaning about the fact that his car’s “management” chip had recently failed, thus rendering his Mercedes into an immobile, upholstered metal/plastic cube, and I thought longingly back to the days when a car’s management system was its driver, not some multi-pronged Chinese piece of silicon.

I fucking hate the modern world.

I think I’ll take the Mauser for a trip to the gun range. No batteries to fail, no chips to malfunction, its technology tried and tested for over a hundred years. Only its old and imperfect management system can screw things up. And I prefer it that way.