The Light Bulbs of Dim Reality

The Down Side of Innovation

by Wi Lu Soong for CWP News Service

“Build it and they will come.”

“Build a better mouse trap and people will beat a path to your door.”

    We have heard this wisdom associated with new ideas all of our lives.  How well do these tidbits hold up in real life?

     John DeMerit of the Association for the Study of Good Ideas Gone Wrong says “you don’t have to look hard to find them.  The Titanic.  Tamiflu,  Thalidomide, DDT, Zyklon B, Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, the CIA's initial support of dictators Saddam Hussain and Augusto Pinoche'.  Giving Enron an incorporation certificate.”

     “It’s not that hard to see the down side of apparently stellar ideas that turn into black holes and dark stars.  I was moving a four hundred year old antique and my wife didn’t want to move her china collection out of it before we jockied it across the floor.  She had heard of “sliders” that placed under a 3000 lb. automobile could be used to move it across a room on a carpet.  The antique was eight feet tall, ten feet long and about two feet deep.  It had glass shelves and mirrors.  We rocked four of its six legs onto the sliders and believing that was enough to provide the clearance we needed, we pushed it across the carpet.  An unseen ridge under the rug knocked off the middle two legs and the whole thing fell into a pile of wood, broken mirrors, china and glass in the center of the room.  Half the china was salvaged.  The remainder was made into a garden tile tableau table that the birds uses as a privy.”
     The advertising firm that promoted the "sliders" on TV used a car, according to DeMerit, because they are heavy and cumbersome when parked, but cars are associated with the same industry that provided the materials in the "sliders".....petro-chemicals.  The subconscious mind relates the two.....they are both movers!  DeMerit believes that the same statement could be made by using a two ton block of granite stone now that it has claimed its place in the kitchen and bath make-over market in the wake of the housing bubble and increase in home remodeling.  People are staying put and justify the previously prohibitive outlays.   Granite was too high an expenditure except for the wealthiest of institution such as banks, insurance companies and government buildings which needed pricey symbols of permanence as part of their marketing message.  The crumbling American family desires to send the same camouflaging message.

     "So anyway," said DeMerit, "I paid $8 each for two four-packs of sliders.  That’s $16.  I drove ten miles each way to get them for $2.00 in gas.  It took me an hour to get to Lowes, get the sliders and return home.  If I was paid a minimum wage of $7.00 an hour that means I spent $25 to trash my antique worth about $5000 including the plates, cups and saucers.  The sliders were of plastic costing about $1.00 to make and package.  Unloading the china cabinet would have taken ten minutes and cost nothing. 

     In 1855 California Governor turned U.S. Senator Milton S. Latham of the San Francisco and London Bank presented a bill to the Senate with these words…..

“A far greater obstacle to our trade with China is the tenacity with which the Chinese, and, more or less, all Eastern peoples, cling to their established customs and usages.  There is no such thing as ‘fashion’ in China, it being an act of piety in a Chinaman to eat, drink, dress, ride and walk like his ancestors.  Nothing in China grows old, or out of date, and there is, consequently, no scope for innovation.”


     Latham's compromised leadership in the American-London banking industry was coupled with his push for a privatized, yet government-back mail service to the Orient that like the British East India Company, found fortunes in opium sales to poor, tradition bound, Chinese.   It was Latham's total misread of the Chinese proclivity to acquiesce to the Western values, especially following the Western flood of Middle East opium into China, that led to the recent Senate and Congressional sensitivity training mandated by each body.

     According to DeMerit, some new innovations are non-sense never replacing common sense.  "Clinging to some established values like a little hard work never goes out of style, though they may not contribute to Mr. Latham’s desire for planned obsolescence and the growth of a nation’s GNP.  Both are predominantly controlled by the power elites who control the oil flow, the plastic production, automobiles, road construction companies, rubber tire vulcanizing plants, estate liquidation companies that sell 400 year old antiques and in all likelihood, the local land-fill, the silver, gold, lead, copper, sulfphur, uranium, lithium and other metals and chemicals which are often discovered by the removal of large granite blocks which are sliced into counter tops for first-world's kitchens and bathrooms replacing Formica which was invented as a less costly replacement for the porous granite that will stain if you don't keep it sealed properly.  Sealing is a twice a year job using sealants made by the same power elites whose paint companies had previously invented Formica.  These power elites are also, not incidentally, owed a good part of the destruction of my wife's beautiful china, cabinet and family heirloom, and her addiction to the TV station that aired the slider myth between episodes of that flim-flammer, Don Draper, on Mad Men," said DeMerit who since his divorce in 2005 has been living in a decreasing density structure  built by an 10-year-old Indian boy named Johnny Falcon Talon on DeMerit's small California ranch in Mendicino County.  It's there that DeMerit has found a physician who prescribes medical marijuana for the pain of angina and his high blood pressure exacerbated by stress along with the recurring pain caused by a small malignant mole removed from left leg in 1999.