LETTERS from CRICKET SONG

Missive the First:

This Present Prosperity.

Dateline:

Friday, July 21, 2000, at 2300 hours CDT.

Conway, Arkansas, USA

By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles

When you’re fifty and unemployed – and I’m both – the stark figure of necessity looks at you from a private mirror and says, in so many words: Whatever remains in that old well of yours . . . . It’s time to drop the bucket deep. Raise the cherished reserves. Do something with what’s left to you.

I hear it said, see it written time and again: These are the most prosperous of times. Jobs go begging, cash and credit flow like warm honey, and the moveable dinner plate is filled and refilled twenty-four hours a day.

The climate is hot with sustained prosperity. In the underlying euphoria, voices of hope sing just a bit louder than usual. They drown out the ceaseless dirge of the age’s prophets of doom.

I’ve got to tell you: I like hope. It may be a thing with feathers (as Emily Dickinson wrote), but I like it nonetheless.

DNA, Quantum Physics, Computer Technology

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku raises his song of hope in a book, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize The 21st Century. (I heard the lyrics on the radio late one night in the springtime.) Dr. Kaku thinks humanity has the chance to create an Age of Aquarius, “a Type One civilization” supported by the triple pillars of DNA, quantum physics, and computer technology.

The Internet, he sings, will become “the fabled Magic Mirror, capable of accessing the world’s collective knowledge.” Microchips will cleave to every facet of daily life, delivering the power of personal control over the mundane affairs of existence. The Operating System will be us.

The demigod Science, wrapped in the robe of quantum physics, will allow its masters to “manipulate matter, almost at will.” Molecules will align themselves according to our whim and fancy. Public Replicators will be installed in every neighborhood and village on the planet to dole out essential material goods, thereby eliminating scarcity and need.

In medicine, leaders of the “DNA revolution” will plot wondrous cures on their freshly printed genome maps. Like the scientists with their atoms, twenty-first century physicians will unleash engineered genes to “manipulate life, almost at will.” They will defeat cancer, delay or overcome aging, and alleviate all classes of disease and pestilence. “Instead of a vaccine, the doctor will inject the correct gene for one of our genetic defects,” Dr. Kaku wrote.

Old, cancerous, robbed, and rudely shoveled?

I won’t argue against material prosperity. I like a fat wallet, a chicken in every cauldron, two vehicles in the garage as much as the next guy. It’s no wonder that the esteemed physicist’s studied hope strikes a resonant chord with today’s satiated materialists.

Who among us, really, wants to grow old and cancerous, then be robbed of our hard-earned microchips? Who wants to be shoveled, quite rudely, into an old folk’s cubbyhole? Not I -- not with the fountain of youth just a mere molecule’s shape-shift beyond my grasp.

However, let’s look at this thing more closely. . . . From a purely personal perspective, of course.

Being out of work and absolutely unknown at age fifty is not the scenario I had anticipated during those dreamy moments of reverie in the many long agos. Then, when I paused to contemplate the future, I imagined a scenario of riches and fame, power and influence, might and magic.

I can’t figure out what happened to derail me. I will say it’s not a profound question. I’m getting along well enough.

Some of you, however, are getting along just too damned well better. The envy in me can’t contemplate it without a sense of unease and discomfort.

Reclining Amid Your Splendor

I’ll bet you’re busy with plans for your next Colorado elk hunt. Or the coming autumn’s long weekend on a Caribbean cruise ship. Or the hiatus at some secluded resort on the Carolina coast. I know it – and don’t call me paranoid! I can smell the leather of your new SUV through the open power window. I can picture you, reclining amid splendor in the vaulted living room of your suburban manor house, analyzing your stock portfolio, or channel surfing on your huge Philips flat screen.

The grass is so lush and green in your valley.

Mind you, I’m not complaining about your success. I’m proud for you. I’m simply trying to convince my ego that I’m not living a life of quiet desperation. I might even be quietly desperate and not know it. Or maybe I’m just unwilling to own up to the sin.

If so – and I won’t admit I’m absolutely convinced otherwise – well. . . . I know I’m not alone. There must be tens of millions of the Others, my fellow peons, each of us condemned to perpetual servitude in the mundane mainstream of existence.

I don’t think so. I really don’t think so. It’s just a supposition. When you’re fifty and recently unhired, you begin to ponder new strains of “issues”.

How stable is this present prosperity, anyway? Someone out there, I suspect, wants to turn against the mainstream and smash the spinning jenny. Are they capable of it? Perhaps. But so what? Another will be built to replace it.

Here’s my scheme, the way out

I’m banking on the prosperity to last -- long enough, at the very least, for my plan of personal restoration to flower and make good fruit. I do have one: the plan, a scheme, my way out. I’ll lay it out for you now as best I can.

The plan embraces one of Dr. Kaku’s three pillars of the Twenty-First Century revolution: computer technology, those “intelligent systems” driven by ever-shrinking microchips.

The plan positions me as a master of certain aspects of microchip technologies: networking architectures and protocols, an operating system or two, popular software applications, and web-oriented programming languages. Such mastery, according to the plan, must be quantified and certified according to standards raised by the computer industry.

I’ll flat-out tell you, I’m not there by a long shot.

The standard I seek to bear has a name. You may have heard it championed on the radio or television in hot pitches promising big bucks to graduates of FastMark Learning Center or Computer Tech U. Start your new job at Seventy Grand and never look back!

Well, whatever: To be precise, I pursue certification from Bill Gates as one of Microsoft’s Certified Systems Engineers (MCSE). I can append the MCSE title to the backside of my name on business cards and display it prominently on my resume or web site. I can take it all the way to the bank.

Millions slain, several thousand needed

Herein lies the rub: Attaining this recognition shall not be so easy, given my lifelong state of formal academic underachievement and my casual disdain for paper-based proof of competence. (I never tire, however, of attempting to teach my old dog Holly several new tricks every winter.)

The state of my brain doesn’t help matters, either. Despite being stone sober for 14 unbroken years, I admit to the quite unintentional slaughter of several million brain cells during the riotous years of youth. I also admit that I could use several hundred thousand of them now.

Nonetheless, I charge full steam ahead.

Here’s what I must accomplish.

I motor to the Capital City in my 1985 Grand Marquis on 6 different summer afternoons (the ideal scenario). I sit in a tiny room before a cold Sylvan Center computer. I download an exam, one after another in the everlasting now:

Exam 70-073, Implementing and Supporting Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0;

Exam 70-067, Implementing and Supporting Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0;

Exam 70-068, Implementing and Supporting Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 in the Enterprise;

Exam 70-058, Networking Essentials;

Exam 70-059, Internetworking with TCP/IP on Microsoft Windows NT 4.0; and

Exam 70-028, System Administration for Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.

In this ideal scenario, I pass each of the 6. I become the MCSE. I stride into the great beyond to win my fame and fortune.

This MCSE track, most certainly, I must run in the very near now. Anything less than full certification is a definite bust. And the clock is ticking. That’s what the plan states.

About 254,000 women and men the world over have won their MCSE, according to a Gocertify Express bulletin of April 17, 2000. (I suspect less than a hundred of them reside in Arkansas.) Several million more have tried, but fallen short of the mark. According to scuttlebutt, about 70 to 80 percent of the test-takers fail.

Those of you who’ve listened to my bluster during the past few years know I’ve talked about “becoming certified” time and again. You also know I’ve yet to sit for an exam. I do detest personal failure. Especially when my intellect is sitting on the examination table. Do I ever, ever detest that flavor of failure!

Often have I failed. Too often, I suppose, for the well-being of my dreams and aspirations. Not this time, however. That is the mantra of the Hour. Not this time.

WATCH FOR MISSIVE THE SECOND in your mailbox just before sundown on Tuesday, July 25, 2000. If you don’t want any of my missive, let me know. I’ll remove you from the subscription list immediately upon demand.

Missive the First was posted to 77 hardy souls.