I'm a Stranger Here Myself (20 page)

It’s Presidents Day tomorrow. I know. I can hardly stand the excitement either.

Presidents Day is a new holiday to me. When I was growing up, we had two presidential holidays in February—Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12 and Washington’s Birthday on February 22. I may not be exactly right on those dates, or indeed even very close, because frankly it’s been a long time since I was growing up and anyway they weren’t very interesting holidays. You didn’t receive presents or get to go on a picnic or anything.

The obvious shortcoming with having a holiday on a date like February 12 or February 22 is that it can fall on any day of the week, whereas most people like to have their public holidays on Mondays, which gives them a long weekend. So for a while America celebrated Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday on the Mondays nearest the appropriate dates. However, this bothered some people of a particular nature, so it was decided to have a single holiday on the third Monday of February and to call it Presidents Day.

The idea now is to honor all the presidents, whether they were good or bad, which I think is swell because it gives us an opportunity to commemorate the more obscure or peculiar presidents—people like Grover Cleveland, who reportedly had the interesting habit of relieving himself out of the Oval Office window, or Zachary Taylor, who never voted in an election and didn’t even vote for himself.

As everyone knows, America has produced quite a few great presidents—Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy. More interestingly, it has also produced several great men who incidentally became president, among them James Madison, Ulysses S Grant, and—you may be surprised to hear me say this—Herbert Hoover.

I have a certain regard for Hoover—
fondness
would be much too strong a word—because he was from Iowa, and so am I. Besides, you have to feel a little sorry for the poor man. He was the only person in American history for whom attaining the White House was a retrograde career move. Nowadays when people think of Hoover at all, it is as the man who gave the world the Great Depression. Hardly anyone remembers the half century of remarkable, even heroic, achievements that preceded it.

Consider his curriculum vitae: Orphaned at eight, he put himself through college (he was in the first graduating class from Stanford University) and became a successful mining engineer in the western United States. He then went off to Australia, where he more or less started the mining industry in Western Australia—still one of the most productive regions in the world—and eventually ended up in London, where he became a vastly wealthy and influential pillar of the business community.

Such was his stature that at the outbreak of the First World War he was invited to join the British Cabinet—a signal honor, to say the least, for an American citizen—but declined and instead took on the job of directing famine relief throughout Europe, an undertaking that he managed with such thoroughness and distinction that it is estimated he saved ten million lives. By the end of the war he was one of the most admired and respected men in the world, known everywhere as the Great Humanitarian.

Returning to America, he became a trusted adviser to Woodrow Wilson, then served as secretary of commerce under Harding and Coolidge, where he oversaw a 58 percent rise in American exports in eight years. When he ran for president in 1928, he was elected in a record landslide.

In March 1929 he was inaugurated. Seven months later Wall Street crashed and the economy went into freefall. Contrary to common belief, Hoover responded at once. He spent more money on public works and unemployment relief than all his predecessors combined, provided $500 million in assistance to troubled banks, even donated his own salary to charity. But he lacked the common touch and alienated the electorate by insisting repeatedly that recovery was just around the corner. In 1932, he was defeated as resoundingly as he had been elected four years before and has been remembered ever since as an abject failure.

Still, at least he is remembered for something, which is more than can be said for many of our chief executives. Of the forty-one men who have risen to the office of president, at least half served with such lack of eminence as to be almost totally forgotten now, which I think is deserving of the warmest approbation. To be president of the United States and not accomplish anything is, after all, a kind of accomplishment in itself.

By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all our leaders was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions. However, Fillmore has become so celebrated for his obscurity that he is no longer actually obscure, which rather disqualifies him from serious consideration.

Far more noteworthy to my mind is the great Chester A. Arthur, who was sworn in as president in 1881, posed for an official photograph, and then, as far as I can make out, was never heard from again. If Arthur’s goal in life was to grow rather splendid facial hair and leave plenty of room in the history books for the achievements of other men, then his presidency can be ranked a sterling success.

Also admirable in their way were Rutherford B. Hayes, who was president from 1877 to 1881 and whose principal devotions were the advocacy of “hard money” and the repeal of the Bland-Allison Act, preoccupations so pointless and abstruse that no one can remember now what they were, and Franklin Pierce, whose term of office from 1853 to 1857 was an interlude of indistinction between two longer periods of anonymity. He spent virtually the whole of his incumbency hopelessly intoxicated, prompting the affectionate slogan “Franklin Pierce, the Hero of Many a Well-Fought Bottle.”

My favorites, however, are the two presidents Harrison. The first was William Henry Harrison, who heroically refused to don an overcoat for his inaugural ceremony in 1841, consequently caught pneumonia, and with engaging swiftness expired. He was president for just thirty days, nearly all of it spent unconscious. Forty years later his grandson, Benjamin Harrison, was elected president and succeeded in the challenging ambition of achieving as little in four years as his grandfather had in a month.

As far as I am concerned, all these men deserve public holidays of their own. So you may conceive my dismay at news that moves are afoot in Congress to abolish Presidents Day and return to observing Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays separately, on the grounds that Lincoln and Washington were truly great men and, moreover, didn’t pee out the window. Can you believe that? Some people have no sense of history.

When we moved to America, the change in electrical systems meant I needed all new stuff for my office—computer, fax machine, answering machine, and so on. I am not good at shopping or parting with large sums of money at the best of times, and the prospect of trailing around a succession of shops listening to sales assistants touting the wonders of various office products filled me with foreboding.

So imagine my delight when in the first computer store I went to I found a machine that had everything built into it— fax, answering machine, electronic address book, Internet capability, you name it. Advertised as “The Complete Home Office Solution,” this computer promised to do everything but make the coffee.

So I took it home and set it up, flexed my fingers, and wrote a perky fax to a friend in London. I typed his fax number in the appropriate box as directed and pushed “Send.” Almost at once, noises of international dialing came out of the computer’s built-in speakers. Then there was a ringing tone, and finally an unfamiliar voice that said:
“Allo? Allo?”

“Hello?” I said in return, and realized that there was no way I could talk to this person, whoever he was.

My computer began to make shrill fax noises.
“Allo? Allo?”
the voice said again, with a touch of puzzlement and alarm. After a moment, he hung up. Instantly, my computer redialed his number.

And so it went for much of the morning, with my computer repeatedly pestering some unknown person in an unknown place while I searched frantically through the manual for a way to abort the operation. Eventually, in desperation, I unplugged the computer, which shut down with a series of “Big Mistake!” and “Crisis in the Hard Drive!” noises.

Three weeks later—this is true—we received a phone bill with $68 in charges for calls to Algiers. Subsequent inquiries revealed that the people who had written the software for the fax program had not considered the possibility of overseas transmissions. The program was designed to read seven-digit phone numbers with three-digit area codes. Confronted with any other combination of numbers, it went into a sort of dial-abedouin default mode.

I also discovered that the electronic address book had a similar aversion to addresses without standard U.S. zip codes, rendering it all but useless for my purposes, and that the answering machine function had a habit of coming on in the middle of conversations.

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a dangerously perfect match.

You will have read about the millennium bug. You know then that at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, all the computers in the world will for some reason go through a thought process something like this: “Well, here we are in a new year that ends in ’00. I expect it’s 1900. But wait—if it’s 1900, computers haven’t been invented yet. Therefore I don’t exist. Guess I had better shut myself down and wipe my memory clean.” The estimated cost to put this right is $200 trillion gazillion or some such preposterous sum. A computer, you see, can calculate pi to twenty thousand places but can’t work out that time always moves forward. Programmers, meanwhile, can write eighty thousand lines of complex code but fail to note that every hundred years you get a new century. It’s a disastrous combination.

When I first read that the computer industry had created a problem for itself so basic, so immense, and so foolish, I suddenly understood why my fax facility and other digital toys are worthless. But this still doesn’t adequately explain the wondrous—the towering—uselessness of my computer’s spell checker.

Like nearly everything else to do with computers, a spell checker is marvelous in principle. When you have done a piece of work, you activate it and it goes through the text looking for words that are misspelled. Actually, since a computer doesn’t understand what words are, it looks for letter clusters it isn’t familiar with, and here is where the disappointment begins.

First, it doesn’t recognize any proper nouns—names of people, places, corporations, and so on—or nonstandard spellings like
kerb
and
colour
. Nor does it recognize many plurals or other variant forms (like
steps
or
stepped
), or abbreviations or acronyms. Nor, evidently, any word coined since Eisenhower was president. Thus, it recognizes
sputnik
and
beatnik
but not
Internet, fax, cyberspace,
or
butthead,
among many others.

But the really distinctive feature of my spell checker—and here is the part that can provide hours of entertainment for anyone who doesn’t have anything approaching a real life—is that it has been programmed to suggest alternatives. These are seldom less than memorable. For this column, for instance, for
Internet
it suggested
internat
(a word that I cannot find in any dictionary, American or British),
internode, interknit,
and
underneath
.
Fax
prompted no fewer than thirty-three suggested alternatives, including
fab, fays, feats, fuzz, feaze, phase,
and at least two more that are unknown to lexicography:
falx
and
phose
.
Cyberspace
drew a blank, but for
cyber
it came up with
chubbier
and
scabbier
.

I have tried without success to discern the logic by which a computer and programmer working in tandem could decide that someone who typed
f-a-x
would really have intended to write
p-h-a-s-e,
or why
cyber
might suggest
chubbier
and
scabbier
but not, say,
watermelon
or
full-service gas station,
to name two equally random alternatives. Still less can I explain how nonexistent words like
phose
and
internat
would get into the program. Call me exacting, but I would submit that a computer program that wants to discard a real word in favor of one that does not exist is not ready to be offered for public use.

Not only does the system suggest imbecilic alternatives, it positively aches to put them in. You have to all but order the program not to insert the wrong word. If you accidentally accept its prompt, it automatically changes that word throughout the text. Thus, to my weary despair, I have in recent months produced work in which “woolens” was changed throughout to “wesleyans,” “Minneapolis” to “monopolists,” and—this is a particular favorite—“Renoir” to “rainware.” If there is a simple way to unpick these involuntary transformations, then I have not found it.

Now I read in
U.S. News & World Report
that the same computer industry that failed to notice the coming of a new millennium has equally failed for years to realize that the materials on which it stores information—magnetic tapes and so forth—irremediably degrade in a not-very-long time. NASA scientists who recently tried to access material on the 1976 Viking mission to Mars discovered that 20 percent of it has simply vanished and that the rest is going fast.

So it looks as if computer programmers will be putting in some late nights over the next couple of years. To which, frankly, I say hooray. Or
haywire, heroin,
and
hoopskirt,
as my computer would prefer it.