Red Ribbons

If, about three quarters through the last century, had you bet me that there would come such things as 80-page faxes, four-and-a-half inch cell phones that would show wide-screen movies,140 character standard messages, that photography paper would become as rare as the canvas stretched for oil paintings, you would of course have won every time.

I would have lost every time.

I would have said something like there are not that many superficial self-important people in the world to make industries, let alone alter our very culture, with such nonsensical ideas.

It is, I think, no coincidence that, with the rise of these and other similar machines, we began to hear about a Lack of Civility.

But with the coming of the office e-mail, there had seemed to be one democratizing development. And that was that bosses no longer got to dictate letters to their secretaries; bosses had to type their own letters. Or so it seemed. Initially. Innocent me again.

The first shadow of what was really going to happen fell across my path in 1961 and was cast by J. Edgar Hoover. At the time I was working for what was then thought of as a rather second-class mass medium. (Fred Allen had said, "Television is being entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your living room.") I leave it to you to number its class today, but in those pre-PBS times there were only a few of us trying to create what was referred to as "quality" television. I was working on a program called OPEN END which, at its best, brought the viewing public interviews with the likes of Nikita Khrushchev and Harry Truman and Edward Kennedy. And I wanted more such luminaries. The Director of the FBI had  never given a television interview and I wrote to invite him to do so.

In those days no letter went unanswered. You could write the subscription manager of LIFE Magazine to order a toaster and you would receive a polite response from that worthy explaining that LIFE was not in that business and suggesting Sears or Montgomery Ward were more likely bets. So, of course, I got a response. Only it was not from Mr. Hoover. It was from a special agent explaining that Mr. Hoover was turning me down.

And that, gentle reader, is what has replaced the boss dictating a letter. Today, again and again, I find that when I write or email or in some way communicate with someone with whom I wish to do quite legitimate business and who has an assistant, it is that assistant, a person I have never met, who tells me that the person I need to talk to will not talk to me.

Remember when they used to ask, "Why settle for second best?"

I'm afraid our age of answering machines, unpaid interns and incivility -- in short, our communication age -- is why.