PARTING SHOT FUTURE IMPERFECT

If you’re going to preview a future that contains some pretty depressing stuff, San Francisco is a nice place to do it. Last month I was there for the annual meeting of the City and Regional Magazine Association (at which, I blushingly add, D was chosen the best of the large-circulation city books). In my voluminous notes I’ve mislaid the exact title of the conference, but it had something to do with confronting the future or challenging the future or at least admitting that the future is going to occur one of these days, like it or not. Not much different, really, from the themes of a hundred other professional meetings this year. Architects, florists, morticians, and proctologists all over America get together and say, okay, the past is a botch and the present is hopelessly muddled, so let’s have a look at the future, shall we?

One difference, perhaps, is that when journalists get together they are told by experts-in this case, Berkeley professors, AIDS activists, demographers, and futurists-that the media can save the world by heeding the advice of the expert who happens to have the podium at the moment. That’s flattering but dangerous, I think. If journalists come to believe we’ve got the power to save the world by adopting causes and rooting out injustice, then don’t we have to accept the negative flip side of that power? Doesn’t that justify the scorn of those who say the press sapped the national will during the Vietnam War, vulgarized our society by glorifying the rich and the stupid, etc.? Perhaps this is a cop-out on my part, but I don’t think headlines and sound bites can save or lose the world, not unless aided by plenty of more powerful forces. The press needs less credit and less blame.

My profession’s nickname-’the press’-is already an old-fashioned, ink-stained term. According to one of the prophets we heard, the press may go the way of the dodo before this century is out. Paul Saffo, whose Institute for the Future helps Fortune 500 companies deal with the impact of new technology, is so obviously brilliant that disputing him seems foolhardy. Beginning with the observation that our society now stores more information electronically than on paper, Saffo argued that the publishing industry is already “a huge electric pinata” covered with a thin paper shell. Some of his words carried a particular sting. He said we will soon witness the demise of the editor as a figure of any importance, because editors are creatures from the age of publishing scarcity. When publishing was an expensive and laborious task, choosing one book or article for publication necessarily meant that several others would never see print, Thus the need for the editor’s discriminating eye. Now, with the rapid growth of desktop publishing and improvements to come on fax systems, we’re entering an age of publishing abundance. Self-publishing and self-distribution will be vastly easier, reducing and eventually ending the editor’s role as gatekeeper. Sure, we’ll howl and gripe, but so did the scribes and copyists who lost their jobs after Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in 1451 ended the church’s monopoly on information. History marches on, as your local blacksmith can tell you.

It was bad enough watching a whole profession hit the scrap heap. But when I heard the learn’d futurist predict the end of books, I almost left my lunch in San Francisco. If you have books in your home-and you do, or you wouldn’t be reading this-do you worry about the fact that most of them spend more time on the shelves than in your hands? Yes, books have a very inefficient “hand-shelf ratio,” and they’re heavy, and they take up lots of space-and let me tell you, they’re hell on the back when you move. Computer disks would hold megabytes more information in a fraction of the space. In fifty years, Saffo said, books may be like horses are now- something hobbyists like to keep around, but hardly central to the way we live.

Maybe I’m just a slow, grumpy troglodyte, but I think this argument misses the whole point of books, which is that they are things with presence and character of their own, with a feel and a smell and a history. They are not just “tools,” or “information systems,” but aesthetic repositories of memory and emotion. And they do furnish a room, forgive the cliche”. Having spent some of my happiest hours in libraries and musty, disorganized bookstores like the wonderful old Harper’s Bookstore in Deep Ellurn and Ken Gjemre’s first Half Price Books on Lovers Lane, I’m not eager to be part of Saffo’s future.

According to another expert, however, I may well be squinting at targe-type videotext a half-century or more from now. Frank Zit-ter, an age demographer, noted that two-thirds of the people who have ever reached sixty-five are living now, and that 40 percent of the population growth up to the year 2000 will come in the forty-four to sixty-five group. Graying boomers are not exactly news, but how about this: the U.S. now has some 50,000 centenarians, a group that has doubled in the past decade. Zitter reminded us that the great majority of the elderly are happy and unimpaired, and urged the media to spotlight “aging heroes” who are happy, independent, and contributing to society.



JUST BEFORE THE CONFERENCE OPENED, one of my own aging heroes passed away. Willie T. Allen, my grandmother, died of natural causes while fast gaining on her 102nd year. When she was born, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was almost thirty years away; when Mark Twain died in 1910, she was already a womanin her twenties. Given her years and her recent illness, the news should not have comeas a surprise, but somehow it did. So manyof her children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren had come to think of her as apermanent feature of the universe, which sheimproved to the very end with a buoyant,gentle spirit and a great sense of humor. Sheoutlived three of her seven children and musthave known her share of grief, but she alwaysleft you feeling that happiness and laughterwere far more natural than sadness and tears,even if you didn’t share her Baptist faith orher distrust of that young upstart, RonaldReagan. She was no Greek and certainly nopagan, but when the news came I thought ofZorba’s epitaph for himself: “Men like meshould live a thousand years.”