In Praise of Macintosh

"[Microsoft] Windows is like the earliest Ford automobiles: you can have any operating system you want, as long as it’s bleak."

Having worked for so long on a Macintosh, a far superior (and, admittedly, slightly more expensive) computer, I have been spoiled; and have lost touch with you afflicted proletarians, toiling under the grim and unforgiving aegis of the Microsoft Death Star.

It is easy for us, the enlightened and blessed minority, to forget what it’s like out there for the vast majority of the oppressed masses, cringing virtually every moment of your waking lives under a cruel lash of conformity and enforced dysfunction.

It’s not your fault: with no chance to compare that which is imposed by your Dark Overlords with that which is freely chosen—the dull and monochrome of Windows versus the full spectrum of freedom, light and color that is the Mac—how are you to know any different? Totalitarian regimes of every age have kept their subjects in the dark, shut off from any alternative way of being.

(Windows is like the earliest Ford automobiles: you can have any operating system you want, as long as it’s bleak.)

I didn’t want to feel superior. I have always been an enemy of class distinctions, even—no, especially!—in an instance like this, when I am comfortably ensconced in the bosom of the advantaged stratum. To the ramparts! Side by side with our disadvantaged brethren!

It’s not as if your cruel masters in Redmond haven’t made valiant efforts to at least make their flagship product SEEM friendly and, well, sensible—even sort of comparable!

Look how closely (if clumsily) the desktop on your computer has impersonated the one on mine: drop-down menus—check; mouse and pointer—check; desktop “icons”—check. 

These impersonations have been cleverly instituted and insidiously established by the faceless operatives of the Dark Side—gradually, with as little fanfare as possible, so that even the most observant of observers might easily forget, by and by, where those innovations originated; and might come to concur with the Bill Gates character in the film “Pirates of Silicon Valley” that all ideas, and especially the ones that have accumulated to make up the design of my desktop (and later, yours) are just “out there somewhere”—a part of the atmosphere we all breathe—and belong, therefore, to everyone, and thus to no one.

Blizzards of legal action have been triggered by the imitation of such desktop items as the Macintosh “trash can” (on a Windows desktop, the ‘greener-than-thou’ “recycle bin”); and the switch of the default orientation of external drives, new files and the like from the right side of the desktop (Macintosh) to the left (Windows). Whoa! I bet nobody saw that coming. “Whatever do you mean? That’s COMPLETELY different and therefore original!”

The “desktop,” by the way, is itself an innovation of the Mac, “adopted” elsewhere in due course.

But let’s not split more hairs.

Here we have scratched at the surface, literally—the part of the computer we all see every day. Let’s not carry on and dissect the whole of it—including what’s under the hood—and worry over who developed what, and who “borrowed” from whom. I think that pattern has already been established. To go further can only engender ill feelings.

Yours, I mean. Not mine. I’m happy with my computer. :)

Welcome (Sort of) to AmeriKa

"We don’t know how the finest minds of the United States Congress were so fiendishly beguiled; [perhaps] some sort of brain-altering hypnotic trance..."

Dear Sir,

My wife and I are immigrants and have just completed our interview for naturalization. We hope to be sworn in, in due course, as citizens of this Great Country and be able to vote in the Nov. Presidential election. We have just been told at an Independence Day gathering that Pres. Bush has found a way to sign legislation into law, circumventing Congress, and has in fact passed several such laws (although no examples could be given). We find this very alarming. Is it true?

—Two New Citizens (maybe)

***

Dear Two New Citizens Maybe:

Sadly, it is true.

Thank you for your query. There are, as you probably know, many benefits to American citizenship, not least among them access to federal government jobs, and the right to get your whole family admitted to our shores, and likewise to get them set up with cushy government posts. What a country!

However, all is not rosy here in the so-called Land of the Free, thanks to George W. Bush and his cruel minions. You have been let in on a little secret that many long-standing citizens of this country still do not know: Bush has, indeed, found a way, as you write, to “sign legislation into law, circumventing Congress,” and he has in fact “passed several such laws.” The fact that “no examples could be given” is merely an indication of the depth and breadth of this sinister conspiracy to first destroy our Constitution and then blow up the world.

We first began to realize the power of the Bushies to influence events when they somehow persuaded the majority of Congress to vote for the “liberation” of Iraq. Liberation! What a laugh! More like, “oil grab for Halliburton”!

We don’t know how the finest minds of the United States Congress were so fiendishly beguiled (although our best guess is some sort of brain-altering hypnotic trance imposed by means of laser beams and subliminal messages broadcast on C-Span).

The important thing is that we know it WAS done; and furthermore, that it was not a “one-off” event, because every time a vote has come up in Congress to continue to fund this illegal war of genocide against the freedom fighters of Al Qaeda, the vote has ultimately gone Bush’s way. Coincidence? Not likely.

Setting aside the issue of HOW these evil pranks have been played, there remains the question of WHY. Are Bush and his foul cohort simply evil beings?

We’re thinking: yes! They’re Republicans, after all, which means they are all sexually repressed, moralizing, war-mongering, Bible-thumping retards with one brain between them (Karl Rove’s).

Stupid but devious, Bush’s vile toadies are running things now, and none of us are safe. They are spying on us all—listening to our phone calls, intercepting emails, snooping in our library records, and probably reading our very thoughts somehow.

They torture prisoners by squirting water in their noses; imprison enemy combatants without as much as a by-your-leave; and carry on their wicked foreign policy as if all the problems in the world were caused by terrorists and assorted foreign troublemakers, instead of the real source: the Dark Lord Dick Cheney.

It’s a grim picture, to be sure. But even a vicious parasite like George W. Bush can’t hold on to power forever. Come November, a new breeze with blow across this country, and it will carry with it a message of Hope and Change, Change and Hope as it purges the foul, stale stench of Republican chicanery from our weary midst.

And you, new citizens, will share in a new kind of Amerika. Welcome!