EAST MONTPELIER – The Mansfield Bar, named for the nearby mountain, is a watering hole near Stowe. It’s also the steel hangey-down thing under the back of a tractor trailer, designed to prevent cars from sliding underneath the rear end of the trailer in the event of a rear-end collision. Actress and blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield, driving at night in a thick Louisiana fog in 1967, crashed into the back of a trailer. Her car slid under it, and she reportedly was decapitated. She was well-known enough to inspire a corrective measure, named, appropriately, the Mansfield Bar. To pass inspection, every trailer has to have one. They don’t look to me sturdy enough to check a speeding car, but I don’t intend to test one myself.
Just before Christmas in 2001, a genuine British numskull, Richard Reid, who’d been radicalized over several years, boarded a Paris-Miami flight with bombs in his ankle-high shoes. His intention was to blow up the plane in mid-flight, committing suicide and multiple homicides and, presumably, gaining points toward Paradise. But he apparently hadn’t rehearsed the ignition process. Alert passengers noticed his clumsy attempts to light a fuse, and overwhelmed him.
Trouble is, ever since then almost all passengers have had to doff their shoes at the airport security gate. I was looking forward to reaching the age of 75, when, it was promised, I could keep my shoes on. But my collection of metal parts so intrigues the inspection booth apparatus that I have to take my shoes off, anyway, and sit there while someone runs off to check one of them for explosive residue. There’s a name for this operation, too, much like the Mansfield Bar, but I can’t mention it here.
So-called civilized societies have in recent years become much more security-conscious. A lot of that, I suspect, has to do with contemporary communications. I can chat carelessly with a friend in Marrakesh or Hamburg, but all day long I get “important messages” to which I’m instructed to respond. I call them Himmler’s Paradise, the state in which the average person has been lied to so often that he no longer believes anything. What can they possibly be after? I’m pretty small potatoes, hardly worth conning or cheating; and I have very little of the vocabulary necessary to deal with instructions from a screen.
Some new parking meters, for example, disdain cash and tell me (in bright sunlight) to “download the app” if I want to pay the fee and be legal. I’m not sure I know what an app is, or if I can figure it out, how to download it.
Used to be that if I wanted to check my bank balance against my own records, I just went online, clicked Banking, and there I was. The notion that anyone but me would be using my computer is ludicrous. But now I have to ask to get into my account and then wait for the bank to send my cell phone a secret number to gain access. The same holds for my credit card account. It’s so much trouble and implicitly insulting that I don’t check as often as I might, which is not a good situation.
Facebook, too. I’d give it up if I could. Almost every time I hit the little icon for the site (is that an app?), I have to go through an interrogation in which I check all the photographs in a display that contain, for example, a bicycle. The photographs are very low-quality, but I guess a lot and always somehow manage to get through.
The local medical and dental institutions send me texts to remind me of the date an hour of imminent appointments. I do appreciate that, and often set my Dick Tracy wrist alarm to rouse me in time to get there. But now they have an added feature. They want you to respond that you got the message. Some, you can simply text YES to acknowledge receipt. An empath designed that one. But others want your email address, phone number, and date of birth. Damned if I will. The Himmler effect kicks in. I think, they already know all this stuff. I could be an ax-murderer answering these questions and they wouldn’t have the least idea. Till I got there.
I don’t know why I bother to get upset or complain about the increasingly dense and confusing forest of information, requests, and demands. It’s all going to happen whether I like it or not. If much more irritated, however, I’m going to start replying to the requests for feedback. Heretofore I’ve either ignored them or just indicated satisfaction. I wonder what’ll happen if I reply, “Worst three hours I’ve spent in years!” At least I’ll find out if anybody reads the responses.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
