Of Bells and Whistles and Remotes

I roll into work early yesterday and park next to Co-Worker. Co-Worker is a proud guy, as I would be too if I were half the handyman he is. Anyway, as we're parked side by side, waiting for Boss Co-Worker to show up and let us in and start cracking the whip, Co-Worker electrically lowers his window. Ah, early morning repartee, I surmise, and duly electrically lower my window. "Wanna check out my new stereo?" Of course I do. Co-Worker's been boasting for a couple days about how he single-handedly (although he is not an amputee, so technically it was a double-handedly job, but still, he did it himself, which is more than I could ever say) installed his new car stereo system. So I get out of my car, walk two steps, and get into his car. He slides in one of the two Van Morrison mixes I just made him to celebrate the return of sound to his car, and damn, Them's "Mystic Eyes" sounds pretty damn good. "Fine job," I say, in that guy-to-guy, you-sure-rigged-this-thing-damn-good voice we guys speak, all the while looking closely at his dashboard for tell-tale signs of a mechanical struggle--stray accidental screw-driver gouges, a slightly punched in panel--any of the signifiers of technical ineptitude that trail any tool-centric job I ever have to undertake--but I don't see a one. This guy's good. "And of course," he smiles and wields a small remote device he had told me about but which I hadn't really believed existed, "it's got a remote." Before I know it, from all of about eight inches away, he presses a button and now Van is singing, "Do do-do do dit, di-do do-do dit," from "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm In Heaven When You Smile)." I am astounded. Not at how great Van Morrison sounds, which is a given, but that I'm sitting in a small car listening to a car stereo system being operated by remote control. Once again, the world proves to me it is insane.

Now of course I don't own a television. So the general concept of a remote is, well, rather remote from my direct, everyday experience. But, yes, I am familiar with them and have used them, and I appreciate them. Having spent a great deal of my youth getting up off the couch to manually turn a clunky knob this way and that to get to one of the five or six functioning channels on our TV, I now love (when the opportunity arises and I am somewhere where a TV exists and I find myself in possession of the grail-like remote) slouching in comfort and pressing buttons at my own whim to follow simultaneously the action on about twenty of the hundred or so available channels. Life in the 21st Century is so nice. But when did remotes become so standard, the de rigueur accompaniment to any device sold? A car stereo with a remote? Unless you're being driven in a limo, what's the point? Doesn't a remote for your car stereo just invite further intrusion by nosy backseat drivers? I don't get it. But I did get a remote when I purchased one of those nifty personal DVD players a while back. Don't get me wrong, being a non-TV person, I love my personal DVD player, but come on, the screen is tiny--if I'm more than a foot and a half away from the screen, I can't distinguish Jack Nicholson from Scatman Crothers in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (or is it The Shining?--from two feet away I can't tell), so why in the hell do I need a remote for this thing? I don't. Which is why the remote for it is presently collecting dust piled up with all the other superfluous remotes I've acquired over the years (here's an idea for the inevitable next generation of Twilight Zone iterations--after years of collecting dust and whatever other environmental toxins are floating around, a box of unused remotes is discovered to be able to control people, yes, egads, PEOPLE!).

Folks, the word "remote" is an adjective, meaning "far apart" or "distant in relationship or connection." From the past participle of the Latin removere, to move away from. It is a fine word. A pity, then, nay, a disgrace, that this fine word has been reduced to a noun meaning only some plastic device used for operating some bigger device usually sitting no more than five feet away. Of course, our present day use of the word remote is shortened from the kind of sexy sounding "remote control." Remember those two glorious words--remote control? My God, back in the 1970s we boys loved those two words, remote control. You could have bought us anything that was remote controlled, and we would have loved it. Even a remote controlled remote control, which did nothing but light up buttons on a different device. Almost as good as the nirvana of two-word constructions--see through, or, sexier yet, see-thru. But no, all we have now is a mere convenience device that overfeeds our sedentary lifestyle, the remote. How cold and stand-offish. Think of the damage done to our culture, our alleged erudition as human beings, that one of the most popular sentences rolling from our tongues now is, "Where the hell is the goddamned remote?" A hundred years ago schoolchildren with a fourth grade education could quote Kipling in a blink; now we're reduced to muttering, "Gimme the remote, asshat!" Armageddon, with or without any Mayan input, is nigh.

At the risk of getting too nostalgic, remember TV guides? Not the official TV Guide (which I believe for years was the most popular magazine in America) but just the local, comes with the newspaper every Friday, then they moved it to Sunday, TV guide? My God what a glorious weekly almanac stuffed with juicy arcana and entertainment. Almost as good as the phone books that have become another relic. I remember watching Jay Leno (back when he was funny; yes, kids, it's true) do ten minutes as a guest on Letterman once doing nothing but reading through a TV guide. Genius. Now you simply press the "menu" button. How mundane. And how sad, that one of the greatest words ever--menu, which should conjure all sorts of delicious fantasies, an array of food, your choice, a salivating read if there ever was one--is now reduced to nothing more than a list of techno-info bits to click. Pop-up menus, a term that thirty years ago would have you greedily foaming at the mouth, now conjures nothing but the taste of bile.

And speaking of salivating, how about the phrase "bells and whistles," which was going to be my main point today? "You gotta have it, Ralph. It comes with all the bells and whistles." I despise this phrase and never use it unironically, because, well, besides sounding so snake-oily, personally, I don't give a rat's ass about either bells or whistles, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that sentiment. My on-line reference source says that the phrase, naturally, comes from those old fairground organs, the more deluxe ones of which came equipped with all sorts of bells and whistles. Fine, while gorging on cotton candy and perusing the sea of unclad, and mainly uncouth, tattooed flesh at a fair, a dizzy ringing whistling organ is the perfect soundtrack, but who goes to fairs anymore and really, aren't those organs kind of obsolete what with synthesized crap blaring from ubiquitous loudspeakers? The reference also claims the phrase was coined in the early 1970s, which I find hard to believe, but which only serves to further my claim that culture has nose-dived in my lifetime.

But to signify any new-fangled thing with the latest techno-gadgets as coming equipped with "all the bells and whistles" is not only haplessly anachronistic, but hopelessly devoid of any creativity. For the most part, bells and whistles, while employed in and of themselves, and not in the service of some jaunty tune, are almost as bad as balls and chains. They're regulatory in nature, aren't they? They call us to attention, quite shrilly, and who needs that? To call bells and whistles totalitarian would be a bit of a stretch, but to hear a bell or a whistle (as opposed to someone gaily whistling, which is quite another, much more pleasant entity) is to be instantly stopped in your tracks and called to task, no? I suggest, in the interest of creativity and to insure that the phrase doesn't become technologically obsolete--as bells and whistles obviously has become--to signify anything that comes fully equipped with all the most modern, desirable features, instead of using bells and whistles, we now say, "And it comes complete with all the bacon and peanut butter." Now that might make me purchase the thing, no questions asked, no demonstrations necessary. As it is now, all "bells and whistles" means to me these days is the shudder of being reprimanded, along with a superfluous remote thrown in.

Ah, but deep down, in the depths of my soul, "bells and whistles" means something much more personal, much more sacred. The extent of my mother's expletive-spewing when I was a kid was an earnest, "Hell's bells!" I instinctively started running for the confessional at the sound of that, though I may not have gotten too far if I heard my father's whistle. If Yahweh, the strictly Old Testament God, wanted to get the immediate attention of His chronically messing up Chosen People, He couldn't have used a more jarring, more stop-'em-in-their-tracks signal than my father's whistle. It came from deep within him, his outer body showing absolutely no sign of the strain it must have taken to summon that earth-shaking clarion call--the lips didn't move, no fingers were inserted in the mouth, just a stoic man somehow making a sound that could make bandits drop their guns, laborers stop their hammers, strippers pull up their underthings, and boys freeze in panic. Oh, those "Hells bells" and that whistle--the stuff of childhood fright and guilt--now are nothing but the music of lost innocence, which is everything. The only remote device I need would have but two buttons: one to activate my mother's "Hells bells," the other to activate my father's colossal whistle. The rest of life I can deal with hands-on.