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The World Is My Phone Booth
Cell phones cause brain death. . . or is it the other way 'round?
The Kaptain's Log
by Manuel Miles, aka Kapt Kanada
[email protected]

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

Having endured the plague of the ineluctable "cell phone" with laudable restraint for some years, I must now speak out against this technological demon. Surely, if ever the devil wanted to harass the few of us who are capable of forming complex thoughts, the cellular empowerment of the chattering classes would be the best tool for the job. There is also considerable evidence that the portable phone habit destroys what few brain cells its addicts initially possessed.

For years now every public space has been inundated with hordes of (mostly teenaged) white trash jabbering on about the weighty matters which occupy their 90 I.Q.-point minds. Their 250 word vocabularies are sufficient for these communications and, being comprised largely of variations on a dozen four-letter words, are an offence to the humans within range of their squawking. What the blithering idiots neither know nor care about is this: yammering into your phone in public is damned rude!

And no place is sacred. Even churches must repeatedly remind their flocks that baa-ing into cell phones during services is not acceptable. Wandering suit-and-tie white trash conduct their various businesses in others' places of business. While washing my hands in a public washroom recently, I was horrified to overhear some fool making a business call while "doing his business" on a toilet!

Classes and motion pictures and romantic moments and automobile traffic must all be interrupted, delayed and sabotaged, often with disastrous consequences, by the "need" to yap and/or text-message to those who are not physically present by those who are not mentally so. (This compulsion is reminiscent of the famous rhetorical question posed by the 60s satirical group, The Fire Sign Theatre; "How can you be in two places at once if you're really nowhere at all?")

Some, upon reading this, will drop their cell phones and spring to their emails to inform me that they have a "right" to be obnoxious. I recognise that one has a right to bad manners, but that still doesn't make it acceptable. I believe that you have a right to say that communism is a boon to the masses, that global warming is gonna git yer mama, that women are oppressed, and that The War On Terror is a noble cause. You are full of s**t if you believe any of the preceding, but that is your right. However, I have the right to ride a bus, shop, eat a meal in a restaurant, and watch a movie in reasonable peace and without having to hear every putrid detail of every idiot's personal life. I have the right to not be run over in a crosswalk by some moron who is only physically present in her vehicle, also.

As a good libertarian I respect the right of industry to mass produce techno-toys for the masses. I only ask that someone also market a cell phone jammer with a range of twenty yards. I'd buy one. Heck, I'd buy stock in the first company to produce one. Then I might be able, once again, to venture outside my home without my earplugs.

Peace and Liberty.

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