Chapter 1 - SAY GOODBYE TO THE BIG 3 R's

Perhaps the most serious threat to America's future is malignatech's insidious ability to destroy the essence of our culture: rationality. This relatively modern way of thinking concentrates on working from the natural world and doing what is logical. If everyone thinks the world is flat, sail to the edge of it and see if you fall off. Magellan accepted that challenge and had a long, exciting voyage to recount. If birds can fly, why not man? Build a device with wings shaped like theirs and soon man is the fastest winged creature on Earth.

That rational thinking was working fairly well for us until nuclear weapons came upon the scene sixty years ago. Suddenly, the rules of warfare were warped completely out of shape. Now a single bomb could destroy an entire city and hundreds of thousands of lives. America was in way over its head. Our government had far more destructive power at its command than all the other nations in the world combined. We were invincible ... for a short while. Then the Soviet Union made a few nukes and the Cold War began. Both countries built thousands of these bombs, enough to destroy every major city on the planet. Rationality took a serious blow to the head with this Mutually Assured Destruction concept. Appropriately dubbed M.A.D., mis doomsday concept created a radically new and depressing sense of helplessness among postwar generations. I still have vivid memories of grammar school air raid drills back in the 1950's. Bells rang and we all dutifully marched out into Central Grammar's long main corridor. We sat down against the wall close together, then at the teacher's command we all leaned in one direction, with one arm covering our head. It was quite cozy and sure beat doing fractions, but I remember thinking at the time: how is leaning on each other going to protect us from getting fried if an atomic bomb goes off anywhere nearby?

Then the '60's arrived, along with the Pill, all sorts of weird drugs, wild rock music, and a gen¬eral feeling of anything goes. If we're all gonna fry in a huge fireball any day, why not have some fun now? With the future looking so grim, lots of young people were desperate to escape reality. Rationality took another major blow to the head when the drug culture emerged. Frying your brain with an acid trip to avoid thinking about having your body fried in a nuclear war is not very rational. That type of warped logic became seductive. As machines make more and more of the decisions we used to have to ponder, we are steadily losing the power to think rationally.

Our main mistake here is assuming that all technology is good and helpful. This leads us to malaxiom #l:

"Technology's powers will always be used for evil purposes to the fullest possible extent."

Smoke detectors save us from fires, obviously, so radar detectors must be doing some good protecting us from radar, right? How dare those state troopers try to arrest drivers who want to race around and endanger innocent lives, right? Wrong!! Radar detectors are a shining example of malignatech at its worst. Why do Americans tolerate an invention that encourages people to break the law?! Why do ads for these insane devices tout the "fact" that radar can somehow get misdirected so the police can mistakenly arrest you for speeding when it was really the car beside you? There is no logic to the invention or sales of radar detectors, yet every other car seems to have one. Would the public approve the sale of "teacher detectors" so pedophiles could attack kids on school playgrounds? Probably not. Which can do more damage, a pedophile or a car doing 80 miles an hour?