This morning, just as I concluded a consultation about Boko Haram’s latest overtures to ISIL with a distraught Nigerian diplomat, Gretchen buzzed me on the intercom.
“Mr. Collins,” she told me, “there’s this old Southern lady on Line Two. She sounds exactly like Woody Allen imitating Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire.”
“Did this person give a name?” I asked.
“Yes,” Gretchen answered, “she says she’s named Linsey or Linseed or something like that.”
“And this person wants to speak with me?” I inquired.
“Uh-huh,” Gretchen confirmed, “she seems pretty adamant about it.”
“And this person,” I sought to confirm, “is haughty, arch and condescending but nevertheless obviously a pathetic bigot and a total ignoramus?”
“Right,” Gretchen huffed, “she got on my nerves in about seven seconds.”
“That’s no woman,” I deduced, “that’s Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Put him through immediately!”
Graham: Hello? Tom Collins?
Tom: At your service, Senator.
Graham: Oh, good. I was growing so dreadfully tired of conversing with that common and vulgar receptionist of yours.
Tom: She’s my private secretary.
Graham: Oh, really? I am so sincerely sorry for you.
Tom: Your condolences are duly acknowledged, Senator. How may I help you today?
Graham: Well, as I am sure you know, there’s this terribly revealing business about that odious Clinton woman and how she concealed her emails while she was appointed Secretary of State by that thoroughly irresponsible and outrageously reprehensible Kenyan mulatto, Barack Hussein Obama.”
Tom: I am well aware of it, Senator. People here in Washington have been speaking of very little else the last few days.
Graham: Very well, young man, that is as it should be. My skin crawls just to consider their very existence. Imagine – a bisexual lesbian and a half-breed Negro in such positions of power within the United States government! Surely, the minds of every civilized person must boggle at the prospect and its manifest and inopportune implications for this great nation. Now then, did you see me on Meet the Press last Sunday?
Tom: I did.
Graham: It was there, alas, that I made a fateful remark.
Tom: Which one was that?
Graham: Why, that I have never, myself, in fact, ever sent an email, of course.
Tom: Oh yes, that. I recall it clearly, Senator.
Graham: As well you should – I am, after all, an extremely notable personage.
Tom: That you are, Senator.
Graham: But since then, I have not been able to go without noticing, what an extraordinary amount of idle gossip my remark has spawned.
Tom: Tongues wag as they must, Senator.
Graham: Well, just for the record, young man, I’ll have you know that recently, I have been jotting down various observations in an exquisite calf-leather bound notebook with my Carl Fisher fountain pen.
Tom: Do tell?
Graham: Made in South Carolina, young man. The finest and most genteel fountain pens ever wrought by the hand of man. And with it, in that notebook, I have written down the term “email,” along with a number of other things. And, as I understand, you are reputed to be the most intelligent person in Washington DC…
Tom: Which, Senator, is a lot like being the tallest building in Baltimore.
Graham: Baltimore? My stars! Not a lot of conservatives there, I don’t think.
Tom: No doubt about that, Senator, on either count.
Graham: Uh… yes… I suppose so. And I understand you don’t… um…
Tom: Charge for my initial consultations? No, Senator, I don’t.
Graham: I see – is that some sort of… marketing strategy or something of the kind?
Tom: It is indeed, Senator. Now – what about this notebook and its contents?
Graham: Oh, yes, well… I’m a very good listener, young man, I always have been, and lately I’ve been writing down all this… chatter… I’ve been overhearing and I wonder if you could… well, frankly, explain what, if anything, this… overeducated nattering means.
Tom: I would be glad to give it my best effort, Senator. Fire away.
Graham: Oh, splendid! All right then, to begin with, explain email to me.
Tom: Certainly. Email is a method of communication on the Internet. Do you know what the Internet is?
Graham: Of course I do – it’s that horrible bunch of tubes and wires and things that lily-livered liberal Al Gore claimed he invented, but he was lying; it was really invented by the Pentagon and got hijacked by a bunch of pimply teenagers who know too much about math and electronics and live in their parents’ basements. Or something like that. People speak far too rapidly in the North, don’t you agree?
Tom: Essentially, yes. Ray Tomlinson, one of those guys working on a contract from the Pentagon back in 1972, invented modern email. It evolved from a system of computer programs developed at MIT in 1965 designated as SNDMGS.
Graham: 1972? Lordy – you mean email has been around that long?
Tom: It has. So long, in fact, disparaging it these days hardly accrues one the least iota of credibility as a Luddite.
Graham: A what?
Tom: Never mind, it doesn’t matter. The idea with email is, you write a message on your computer that gets transmitted over the Internet to someone else who reads it at their computer. In addition to writing them a message, you can also drop things, like pictures, into the text, or attach documents, images or even videos which they can open when they receive the message. Furthermore, you can send “carbon copies” of your email to any number of other people, when the other party receives your email, they can automatically reply to you, any one of the “carbon copy” recipients, or everyone involved. That’s called a “Reply All.” Moreover, anyone to whom you Reply can Reply back again, creating what is known as an email “thread,” which is properly read from the bottom up, you see, as each Reply stacks up upon the previous one. Finally, there’s a “Blind Carbon Copy” feature, which allows selected persons other than your primary recipient to read the original email and all of the Reply emails in the thread in complete anonymity.
Graham: Heavens to Betsy, that Blind Carbon Copy sounds extremely unscrupulous and deceitful. I must say, I simply can’t imagine using something like that myself. I am simply incapable of imagining it. Utterly incapable of imagination.
Tom: I have no reason whatsoever to doubt it, Senator.
Graham: Uh… why yes, thank you. And so what’s this spam email, then?
Tom: That’s when some moron decides to exploit email, using a computer program to send emails to millions of people they don’t know.
Graham: How’s that different from slipping a campaign flyer under everybody’s door in the neighborhood?
Tom: Provided that the neighborhood to which you refer is populated by citizens who might conceivably vote for you in the next election, the difference is, spammers are slipping extortion notes under the doors of everybody on the planet.
Graham: Oh, my goodness, such perfidy!
Tom: My sentiments exactly.
Graham: And can you tell me, young man, what this Facebook business is all about?
Tom: Facebook is what the Internet cognoscenti…
Graham: Excuse me, young man – the who?
Tom: The individuals who are highly knowledgable about the Internet call Facebook a “walled garden.” It’s a part of the World Wide Web…
Graham: But isn’t that Web the same thing as the Internet?
Tom: No, the World Wide Web is a subset of the Internet.
Graham: Subset? What’s a subset?
Tom: Well, Senator, the Internet is bigger than the World Wide Web. The Internet contains the World Wide Web. That’s what I’m trying to say.
Graham: Then what’s Facebook, again?
Tom: It’s a subset of the World Wide Web, constructed so that once people get in, it’s very difficult for them to get out.
Graham: You mean, it’s some kind of trap?
Tom: In the sense that a corn field Halloween maze is some kind of trap, yes. You’re expected to hang around inside Facebook and ignore the rest of the Internet.
Graham: What’s the point of that?
Tom: To collect people’s personal information and sell it to advertisers.
Graham: Land of Goshen! That sounds even more evil than spam!
Tom: I think a lot of folks would agree with you on that point, Senator.
Graham: All right then, next on my list is a “smart phone.” Can you tell me what that’s supposed to be? Because I’d say this here phone on my desk is about as dumb as a sack of grits.
Tom: Well, for starters, Senator, I guess you know what a cellular telephone is, right?
Graham: Oh yes, I remember when they first came out – great big things the size of bricks.
Tom: Correct. But they have gotten considerably smaller; and, what’s more, nowadays a significant portion of them have a computer inside just about as powerful as the ones your staffers have on their desks.
Graham: No! Inside those itty-bitty little old things?
Tom: Hard to believe, Senator, but nevertheless true. And these days, those cellular telephone towers use their radio signals to transmit digital information, same as comes out of the wall and goes into your staffers’ desktop computers.
Graham: That the same as this “wi-fi” I hear the young’uns talking about?
Tom: Not exactly. They’re both radio…
Graham: Radio? You mean like Amos and Andy?
Tom: Insofar as Amos and Andy was a controlled broadcast of electromagnetic spectrum radiation, yes, I’d have to admit the truth. Wi-fi, cellular telephones, as well as Amos and Andy are – or was, in the case of Amos and Andy – merely different types of radio.
Graham: The same kind of radio where you could put your hand on top of the set and pray along with Reverend Billy and have it send your message straight up to Jesus in Heaven?
Tom: I’m not sure radio works exactly like that, Senator. Not even Apple wi-fi.
Graham: So what’s this Bluetooth all about, then?
Tom: Simply another form of radio, Senator. It’s just really accurate, high capacity and short range. It’s used to connect component devices together, like a wireless keyboard or a pair of digital headphones linked to a computer in somebody’s living room for example.
Graham: So is this Twitter thing radio, too?
Tom: No, twitter is a type of Web log, or “blog” as they are often called.
Graham: Blogs? Yeah, I have them here on my list, and I know I get mentioned on a lot of them, or so my staffers tell me. What on God’s green earth are they good for?
Tom: I often wonder that myself, Senator. In general, they serve as an online journal or diary of events. The distinguishing characteristics of Twitter are first, your journal entry cannot exceed one hundred and forty characters; second, other members of Twitter can sign up to receive your so-called “micro-blog” entries and “follow” you as you make them; third, any “tweet” you make containing a micro-blog entry can be “re-tweeted” by any of your followers, and subsequently by any of their followers and so forth; and, fourthly, tweeters can categorize their tweets using a system called “hashtags,” which allows members of Twitter to view tweets from numerous sources under a single rubric.
Graham: And what’s all that good for?
Tom: Making comments that get you fired from your job, divorced or generally ruin your life; and, organizing and running terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
Graham: Oh, my Lord, just contemplating something like that gives me the vapors! What kind of twisted, demented mind could even think of such a horrible, perverted and evil thing as this Twitter monstrosity you have just described?
Tom: The same kind of mind that thought of Facebook – its primary usages are the same as Twitter’s.
Graham: I am shocked – shocked, I tell you, to learn that both of those things get people fired from their jobs, divorced and generally ruin their lives; and worst of all, that terrorists use them!
Tom: Those circumstances have made their founders billionaires, of course.
Graham: Horrors! Why, it’s enough to shake one’s faith in humanity itself!
Tom: Indeed it is. I can’t help but think that if Alan Turing had known what computers would do to us, he would have left the theory of computability to lesser minds and become a Hollywood motion picture star instead.
Graham: Who’s Alan Turing?
Tom: Oh, never mind. It doesn’t matter.
Graham: Very well, then young man, what’s this Instagram thing?
Tom: It’s a way of using your smart phone to take embarrassing pictures of yourself and your friends, then spreading them all over the Internet for the illicit pleasure of every self-polluting buffoon in the world.
Graham: People do that… voluntarily?
Tom: People do that with unbridled enthusiasm, sir.
Graham: And what’s Snapchat, then?
Tom: You take a picture with your smart phone, type in a clever caption, then send it to your friends. They view your creation, then shortly afterward, it supposedly disappears, never to be seen again, least of all by every self-polluting buffoon in the world.
Graham: Supposedly?
Tom: The Snapchat concept is based on the principle that gullible fools can’t conceive of the fact that once something is transmitted through the Internet, it will essentially exist forever, no matter what some idiots who run a lame Web service like Snapchat think.
Graham: Really? Why is that?
Tom: Because the NSA is recording everything that is transmitted via the Internet, everywhere, all the time.
Graham: Well, thank God for that! It’s good to know somebody’s doing their job with this sordid Internet business, anyway. What’s a meme?
Tom: It’s a unit of cultural content or symbolism that spreads through the Internet in a viral manner.
Graham: Viral? You mean, it’s like a disease?
Tom: Most of the time, yes.
Graham: Well! It sounds to me, young man, like the Internet is a pretty dangerous place!
Tom: In the immortal words of Ed McMahon, you are correct, sir. Any other questions or issues I can address?
Graham: Um… uh… er… well… have you ever, you know… done it… with a lady?
Tom: Why yes, of course.
Graham: What’s it like?
Tom: Ah… excuse me, Senator, I’ve just received a text message that a severe run on the Euro is materializing and the consequences for the world banking system could be extremely catastrophic, should appropriate steps not be taken immediately, if not sooner. Can you call back tomorrow?
Graham: I… I… well, I don’t know, I’m extremely busy, after all, being a United States senator. Did I mention you have a lovely voice? So strong, so assertive, so authoritative, so… manly. I must confess, just listening to you speak, well, it has me quite beside myself. Perhaps we could continue this conversation later on today, some place nice and cozy?
Tom: Not today, Senator – I’m afraid that, at the moment, the international economy needs me more than any one person ever possibly could.
Graham: Tom, when you talk about the international economy, it just sets my little heart all a-flutter, like a tiny, helpless, defenseless, shy and demure hummingbird.
Tom: With all due respect, Senator, any ornithologist will tell you that hummingbirds are anything but helpless, shy and demure. Ounce for ounce, they are some of the nastiest, most aggressive creatures in God’s whole creation. Now, if I may, good day, sir.
Graham: And good day to you. But you don’t mind if I… call back, do you?
Tom: Absolutely not. You are always welcome. However, in the future, my usual consultation hourly rates will apply.
Graham: Well, I guess I’ll just have to break open my precious little old piggy bank, won’t I? ‘Bye now, babycakes.
Tom: Ciao, Senator.