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So much to get across. The face creams. The foot powders. The hair sprays. The hair growers. Have you learned to grow hair? Does such a thing matter? The height of us: an average of 5 ft. 3 1/2 in. for women, 5 ft. 9 in. for men. You must be taller now. Have you raised the height of the baskets? I mean in basketball. Do you play it still? And football, and baseball? You must be playing baseball; we call it the national pastime, if you do not count self- inspection. (A future without baseball?) Did I mention hibachis, Exercycles, capped teeth, diet drinks, sofa beds, Winnebagos, microwaves, VCRs, IBMs, electric pencil sharpeners, electric knives, electric chairs, Minute Rice, bullet trains, Dial-A-Prayer, Dial-A-Psychotherap ist, automatic windows, automatic doors, wash 'n' wear, Shake 'n' Bake, heat 'n' serve? Did I tell you the one about the traveling salesman, or the minister, the rabbi and the priest? The humor of our times would baffle you to distraction. A contemporary comedian brings down the house by relating situations in which he receives no respect.
Yet this is all still a sketch. If we were in your shoes, reading a communication from our antique past, we might be mildly interested in the geopolitical picture, the state of the Union, the family and store. But we would be a lot more curious about the life we could not see so readily, the secrets of an era that lie like pike beneath the news, and then, on their own peculiar impulse, rise to the surface in a later time, like ours, like yours. More than that, we would like to know what it felt like to be alive back then. That will be more difficult to convey, in part because we assume that to be human feels just about the same in any age. But we may be wrong about that as well. The terror and self-doubt we associate with being human you may have learned to cure with a shot or a pill. We will give you what we know. One secret of our age is that we are learning that democracy can kill democracy. For one thing, excessive freedoms have made it almost impossible for an ethical conscience to assert itself. People have been free to ignore social obligations, to abuse one another, to kill themselves.
For another thing, the very inventions that came into being to make democracy more democratic, in practice have delimited the nation's most fundamental liberties. Instruments like television and high-speed printing presses have turned America into a village of common thought, which theoretically ought to enhance a people's power to govern their own destinies. But the ability of other people, specialized people, to control those thoughts has grown with the inventions. Political campaigns are managed not by the candidates but by media experts, who indeed seem expert in determining how the majority thinks and votes. A huge business these days is called public relations, which in fact is concerned with the most private relations of well- trained people with information on social patterns. That enterprise has taken the expansiveness of democracy and honed it to a point from which a few manipulate the many.