Start, Adam!--a short story

1731startAdam/1140 words

March 24, 2016

Start, Adam!

A short story by

Harley L. Sachs

My niece Steffi used to drive a Coronado convertible that talked. It used to say things like “A door is ajar” or “A tire is low,” and even reminded you to get gas. When I bought my Honda accord, instead of voice commands like on the Coronado, the voice remarks were replaced by little lights on the dash and a peeping sound if I forgot to take out the ignition key or turn off the headlights.

Then my car insurance company insisted on having a monitor installed to track my driving habits. I discovered that they raised the rates because I had driven thirty-three miles an hour in a thirty mile zone and ran an intersection on the yellow. That was the last straw.

My doctor diagnosed a Parkinson’s tremble in my wrists and my eyes have cataracts, so what I needed, and what is now available, is a self-driving car so I can get around. If the self driving car goes thirty-three in a thirty mile zone it’s the car’s fault, not mine.

A self drive car is the latest of the latest. I can call the car on my cell phone and it drives itself up to the door to pick me up and take me wherever I need to go. No more fear of running a red light or missing a stop sign or even speeding twenty-five in a twenty mile zone. Perfect, I thought.

We often name our tools and machines. My grandfather’s Ford was called Lizzy and my father’s computer was called Earnest because he was a Hemingway fan. My self-drive car is Adam. I don’t even need an ignition key, because Adam is programmed to respond to the sound of only my own voice. No one else can use Adam.When I approach it I say “Open, Adam and the passenger door pops open. I get in, sit down, and say “Adam, start.” The electric motor make a little sound and Adam says “Where to you want to go, Harley?”

 That’s my name, Harley. Me and my car are on a first name basis.

This is the ultimate integration of man and machine, or machine and man, whichever way you want to look at it. We are more closely attuned to one another than a cowboy who spends all day in the saddle of his horse. We understand each other, or rather, Adam understands me.

They call it AI, or artificial intelligence. Adam is learning all the time. The first day we were out for a test drive, a dog ran out into the street right in front of Adam. I thought I’d have a heart attack. Driving is complicated and dangerous. Millions of situations can come up that are not in the book. Ah, but according to the user’s manual, all the self-drive cars are learning from each other.

 When a new situation is encountered by one of them, they all learn it.  I knew the sensors looked out for stop signs and the GPS kept track of the speed zones  and intersections, but I didn’t think they were programmed for encounters with, say, a dog in the street or a little kid’s ball—generally followed by a child who runs into the traffic. By golly, they were! Before I could yell, “Adam stop!” Adam stopped and didn’t hit the dog. It was amazing. My own reflexes are too slow. I would have hit the dog. Not Adam.

Adam is one smart car.

This morning I was so eager to get out I hadn’t had breakfast, so I told Adam, “Adam take me to the nearest MacDonald’s.” Off we went.

Adam pulled up at the drive by window and stopped so I could place my order. If you aren’t chipped with and under skin debit ID tag, you have to put your card in the slot and tell them your order. . I was hungry. I ordered a milk shake. and a super size Big Mac with fries

A little bell rang and the voice at the window said “I recommend coffee and an egg McMuffin.”

“But I want a super size meal with extra fries.”

The voice out of the window took on a patronizing tone. “Harley, a super size meal is too many calories, fat, and salt for your diet. Your doctor recommends no more than coffee and an egg McMuffin.”

I didn’t expect an argument. I know my name is programmed into my credit card, so it’s no surprise that the McDonald’s window knows who I am, but I didn’t expect it would also know my medical history. It’s all there, of course, for my protection.

 If I do have a medical emergency, the EMTs will find out right away what to look for and have my whole past medical history right there. I just didn’t think the McDonald’s drive up window would notice or even care. My diet is none of their business. Their business is to sell fast foods, isn’t it? Not to be watch dog over my diet.

I get it. There’s was such a cry about obesity that the restaurants were afraid of litigation. Too much fat and salt in customer’s diets and the industry could be sued. Can’t be too careful.

I sat there a minute trying not to lose my temper. Finally I said, “Forget it. Adam, take me to Taco Bell.”

As we pulled away I thought I heard the McDonald’s window exclaim,” Taco Bell! Ugh.”

At Taco Bell, it was more of the same. The only order they would accept was decaf coffee and a breakfast burrito. No fries. I may have to go back to home made toast, with jam, no butter, and a small glass of fat free milk.

I settled for the decaf and the burrito but the coffee was too hot. It’s not a good thing to gulp hot coffee.  Started to choke and cough and my voice was, well, not my own. Adam didn’t recognize me.

“Are you OK, Harley?”

I was still rasping and coughing.

There was a pause and I heard the electric motor start up. Adam said, “Hospital.”

I protested. “No hospital. I just need to catch my breath.”

“Hospital.”

“Godammit, Adam, I don’t need a hospital. Just take me home.” I think I added an expletive.

Adam is not programmed for expletives.

“Watch your language.”

“Don’t give me an argument Adam. I’m OK. Just take me home.”

Didn’t help. Adam drove up to the emergency room and would not open the door until the EMTs came to get me out. Of course, they couldn’t get Adam to open the door. It's programmed for my voice.

I called the self-drive dealer and asked for a technician. It’s a busy day. It may take a couple of hours. In the meantime, “HELP!” 

Chipped

1730chipped/ 1410 words

Jan. 30, 2016

Chipped

A short story

My troubles began when I inherited money from my aunt. Suddenly it was possible for me to replace my aging Ford with the latest model of a Lexus hybrid. It had everything, including back-up video what showed what was behind me when I shifted into reverse, a self-parking feature, and GPS.

The World Wide insurance company would give me a special rate if I let them use the built-in GPS to monitor my driving habits. I guess we all think we are better than average drivers, just as we think we are middle class, but aren’t. The Lexus had used up most of my aunt’s money, so I agreed. Anything that saves a little money is good when you are a so-called adjunct instructor.

Adjunct instructor means no benefits and being paid on a piecework basis like someone in a textile sweatshop, paid per button hole. To survive I teach courses in five local colleges, rushing from one to another, a course here, another there, but generally the same thing: what they used to call remedial or bonehead English for kids who think they are college material but read and write at the sixth grade level. Tenure? Forget about it. Tenure went out with the Reagan budget cuts for the department of education.

Even so, I can see that even being a gypsy instructor of bonehead English is a fading profession, if you could call it that. They are developing an on line do it at home on your own time English course. Kids write their homework assignments on screen, send them to the cloud professor which not only checks for grammar and spelling but compares what they write with everything else everyone else writes. Big daddy in the cloud knows.  One instance of plagiarism and you lose your tuition deposit. No appeals. No second chances. Sucker. When Big Daddy in the Cloud kicked in, how would I find work at all?

In the meantime I was really enjoying the Lexus, zipping smoothly from campus to campus and burning hardly any gas even though gasoline has dropped below a buck a gallon. Ah, technology!

Then at the end of the first month I got a bill. According to my GPS driving record, World Insurance said I had been speeding, forty-one in a thirty mile zone. I was just keeping up with the traffic. Nobody drives thirty in a thirty mile zone, or fifty-five on the freeway. If you don’t keep up, you may be rear ended or cause an accident when someone cuts around you to pass. Maybe when the self-driving cars come out with sensors that evaluate all the traffic around you keeping up with the traffic may be a valid excuse for speeding. Not yet.

So World Insurance jacked up my special bargain rate. Seems I had also rolled slowly through stop signs without actually coming to a dead stop. More points off. Considering all the mistakes or violations I had allegedly made, I would not have passed a driving test. I told them I wanted to cancel the insurance and disconnect the GPS spy, but  there was something sinister in the fine print of the policy. No cancellations permitted, no refunds. Only World Insurance could release me, but they would not. I was stuck. But that wasn’t all.

Those rats at World Insurance turned over my driving records to all the little towns where I was teaching: Beaverton, Forest Grove, Gresham… even Sandy where I had made a wrong turn. They all gave me tickets.

They weren’t cheap. Imagine $185 for not coming to a complete, dead stop. I had even been ticketed for going through an intersection on a yellow. The light had changed from green just as I entered the intersection. Too bad, Charlie. Another two hundred bucks. All because I was ratted out by my GPS!

If I didn’t pay, what then?

Thanks to the GPS, the traffic tickers for one month were more than I was making as an adjunct. I decided to park the car and take public transportation, but it was too late. I had missed paying the ticket in Sandy and would you believe? They gave me thirty days in jail. That hit me during school vacation, so I didn’t lose my jobs.

 My cell mate  wasn’t Bubbe the sodomist, just a dead beat who hadn’t paid child support. The jail wasn’t as bad as they put it in crime novels, and I figured at least I was saving on my grocery bill. Then I found out I had to pay motel rates for room and board for my time in the jail.  I was given two years probation after my release, but I had to pay the salary of the PO, the Parole Officer, plus administrative costs. If I didn’t pay? I shudder to think about it.

The kicker was, when I was released, a condition was that I was to be chipped. In the old days someone on parole or probation might have a GPS ankle bracelet. Ah, but one felon had taken off his bracelet and put it on his dog. He let the dog go in Forest Park and then laughed when the cops went nuts trying to locate him, except it was the dog. Back in the slammer, as they call it. An imbedded chip solved that problem.

What I didn’t know, but found out, was that the tiny chip under the skin of my right wrist wasn’t just a locator.  Besides being a built in GPS, it was loaded with my medical records and bank account.

The technician who inserted it, which wasn’t more painful than a flu shot, was proud. “You don’t have to worry about paying those traffic fines any more,” he said, like he had just invented the light bulb. “They are automatically deducted from your bank account. And you hardly need cash or a  credit card anymore. Just pass your wrist under the reader at the checkout and the bill is withdrawn from our account. Nobody can steal your identity.”

Not that anybody would want to steal mine, a known jail bird.. “What if they cut off my arm and use it for the embedded ID?”

That got him. “Maybe we should have the chip under the skin of your scalp. Then they’d have to chop off your head. At that point, the chip would report that you were dead and your accounts would be closed”

“Lucky me.”

I left the Sandy jail a free man. When I flagged down the bus back to Gresham  I just passed my wrist under the reader and the fare was deducted from my account, not that there was much left in it. Same on the Max in Gresham.

They’ve taken away all the ticket machines and ATMs. Nobody needs cash any more. I don’t need to carry my ID in a wallet someone might steal.

Just as I feared, bonehead English is being replaced by Professor Cloud. I am not even an adjunct any more. I sold the Lexus, the only way I could get out of the World Insurance contract. As an unemployed person, my SNAP food allotment is remotely programmed into my chip. The reader at Fred Meyer grocery just deducts what I have spent. I no longer have to show a picture ID anywhere. I am the ID.

I’m a free man. Of course, it is illusory. The International Metadata megabase knows where I am all the time, what I eat, where I go, what I read at the library. Everything.

I  have one surviving old high school buddy, Fred.. He lives in Cuba now.  He sent me a letter, a real letter. It was in one of those envelopes of something synthetic you can’t even tear, and sealed so you can’t open it without destroying it. His letter was sandwiched in aluminum foil. It’s tamper proof.

Fred said he had his chip surgically removed and embedded in a fish. So far as NSA and the government watchers are concerned, he’s swimming somewhere in the south Atlantic. Fred says he doesn’t phone, text, email, or use a computer. He doesn’t have a phone.  Hand written snail mail letters are the last secure means of communication.

Fred says he is getting used to a diet of rice and beans. Cuba needs English teachers The rum is good, the music great,  and the girls willing. I think I’ll join him. 

C hange One Word of fhe 2nd Amendment

1730toarms!/209 words

January 7, 2016

Change One Word

A letter by

Harley L. Sachs

Everyone knows the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms. What if we change one word? Change “right” to “Responsibility” and what do you get? You get every citizen required to be armed.

There is precedent for this. In Israel every citizen, with some exceptions, male and female, is required to serve in the IDF. In Switzerland every able-bodied male must serve in the Home Guard and keep his rifle at home with ammunition. When I registered for the draft I had to carry my registration card at all times.

Of course, we cannot have sexual discrimination in the USA, so every eighteen year old, male or female citizen would have to register for the militia as provided for in the second amendment.

Result: every able-bodied male or female US citizen at eighteen would be issued an assault rifle, and trained to use it. I wonder how the NRA and gun lovers will feel when every Afro-American, every Hispanic, every Muslim citizen of the United State would be required to be in the militia and issued an assault rifle. The gun makers will get richer and the NRA will be pleased. With an armed militia, no terrorist would dare attack.

It’s only one word to change. 

Letter to Wall Street Journal

Kim, have you ever had an eleven hour job interview against a panel of mostly hostile evaluators? Read this carefully and you'll get to the point -eventually.

If you know what the Fog of War is, it's the state of confusion in the midst of battle. The Benghazi attack lasted one hour and by the time the word got to Washington it was about over and there was no hope of reinforcements ever getting there on time to accomplish anything. In the confusion that followed we could only guess who was responsible.  That explains the conflicting statements that came afterwards. It was NOT a cover up. Anyone who has compared eye witness accounts of an event knows that. The questioning  confirmed that. Mrs. Clinton was not responsible for the security at the consulate. Remember: it was the GOP congress that cut the security budget for the State Department by millions of dollars.

-- That Mrs.Clinton has not reminded the public of that fact is an act of charity, for it is the responsibility of the Republican congress that there was inadequate money for the protection of those four men. We'we talking about four casualties, not the thousands who have died because Bush sent our troops to war in Iraq.

The Wall Street Journal, while it has swell international coverage, is a disappointment for it NEVER has anything good to say about our twice elected president or Mrs.Clinton, one of the most indefatigable secretaries of state we have ever had.What you seem to have missed in your sniping at Mrs.Clinton is that the attempt to discredit her by the GOP members of the panel is that she was in reality having a job interview. She proved by her unflinching and knowledgeable demonsrtration of her talent and intelligence that she will make a great president. No one else knows as much as she does. She knows all heads of state. As First Lady she has eight years of White House experience. She is much smarter and composed than her husband. She will make a great president. Her performance for eleven gruelling hours that would reduce most witnesses to blubbering blobs proves she she knows her stuff more than any Republican wannabe candidate for the job. The GOP shot themselves in the ass by giving her this opportunity to show them all up for what they are: a bunch of nitpicking desperate man without qualifications of their own to match her experience and talent. 

Discover yourself: write your autobiography

1727Why autobio/850 words

10/4/15

                                          Why Write Your Autobiography?

A column by

Harley L. Sachs

Some say the past is history, the future a mystery, and the present a present. The fact is, most of us live in the present, this moment, and lose sight of the broad sweep of our lives, who we are now, how we got to be what we are, where we came from, and what molded us. We lose sight of ourselves. All the more reason to embark on the adventure of writing your own biography.

An autobiography may be an author’s version of a selfie, except a selfie catches only the moment while a biography encompasses a whole life. That’s where the adventure lies.

I have just completed my autobiography. It fills three hefty volumes and I don’t even have a photographic memory, as some rare people do.  I didn’t begin with the cliché “I was born on…” but with my immigrant grandparents, where they came from and how they got to the United States. I could have started with my DNA report which goes back about 300 years , but that is expressed only in percentages of a geographical area. I may be 0.28% Neanderthal, but that doesn’t identify any individuals. More important were specific people and what we can learn, for instance, from old family photographs. It’s what authors call the back story.

If you want to get a grip on your life and who you are, write down those moments like in Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.” At what points did you make a life changing decision? What decisisons did you make that had a life long impact? Did you pick the wrong school? The wrong job? Choose the wrong country to live in? Marry the wrong spouse?

What mistakes did you make? For me it was not to accept social security when I was a contract agent, for I did not then know when or whether I would return to the United States. I was living in the present and not taking the long view.

There are other milestones in life. I once published a column on milestone, memorable meals. We remember the worst meals and the best. The column may have been interesting to read, but except for revealing my tastes in food, it was not that defining of me as a person.  Or was it? They say we are what we eat, and maybe what we eat does say a lot about us.

What struck me when I worked on my autobiography was the role of coincidence and accident that changed my life. We think we have control of our lives. We pick the school where we want to study. We choose carefully who to marry. But who we marry may be the result of a chance encounter. I had been accepted for graduate study at Innsbruck University in Austria, but a chance encounter sent me to Sweden instead where I learned another language, started teaching, and met my future wife—all because of a chance encounter. It was also by chance that I played bridge with someone who turned out to be a CIA spotter which got me to the Soviet Union. Accident? Certainly not by my design. And it was solely by chance that my job teaching the Stockholm police found me an apartment in the building where I met my future wife. Accident.

When you starting digging into your past and finding those moments you begin to feel like a pin ball bouncing from pin to pin at random, hardly in control at all. Fate?

When you sit down to write that autobiography, that adventure in self-discovery, it helps to have kept a journal or a diary. I began keeping a diary when I was fourteen and those diaries have been vital when I wrote several memoirs of my travels and adventures.

Where would Oregon be without the diaries of the women who traveled the Oregon Trail? Now it’s our turn. The past is history, but when you get to a certain age, you are yourself history. You are a walking around store of historical moments, of those peace marches, those political rallies. I was in Portland when Mt. St. Helens blew up. I was here. Those things I carry around in my memory, but unless I write them down, when I die they are gone forever.

My autobiography is not for sale. It is for only the eyes of my children so they will know their father. If it were published, that is, made public, Too many feathers would be ruffled. Some secrets shall be kept in the family. I haven’t written the last chapter, That’s the one about my funeral and someone else has to do that.

Still, the exercise of writing that autobiography has brought an epiphany of self-realization. So that’s who I am! Wow! What fun!

Harley L. Sachs is the author of several memoirs: “From Tent to Castle: Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon,” “The 1957 Sachs Arctic Expedition” and “Chilly-Chilly-BANG! How we Freelanced Through Europe’s Coldest Winter in a VW with a Kid.”

Amend the War Powers Act

Currently the USA is involved in Middle East Wars using mercenary troops. Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are lost causes. If we could not go to war without universal conscription (male and female) and a war tax, these wars would never have involved the USA. The public would not strand for it. Rome fell in part because it relied on mercenary troops. The factors that got us in thee wars were idealistic crusaders who believe democracy can be exported and cynical arms and oil merchants who want the money. When will we ever learn?,

Are you a Socialist?

1725socialist/ words

April 23, 2015

Are You A Socialist?

A letter by

Harley L. Sachs

www.HarleySachs.com

There is an inordinate, irrational fear of socialism in this country dating back to the 1920’s and the infamous Sacco-Vanzetti trial in which two innocent anarchists were executed for a couple of murders later confessed to by a criminal gang member. In the 1920’s during the great surge of immigrants from Italy and other European countries, there was a general fear of anarchists, communists, and other radicals. The result of his panic was the end of open immigration and a quota system limiting how many could come to the USA from various countries. The quotas still exist.

Most Americans don’t know the difference between socialism and communism, equating them with something akin to Soviet police state communism. It’s not true.

The United States is more socialist than you may realize. Everything funded by taxes is socialist. The postal system is socialist; public libraries and schools are socialist, state universities are socialist, Medicare and Medicaid are socialist programs, the VA is socialized medicine for all veterans, and then there is social security. You can hardly escape American socialism.

If you are a true T Party Libertarian, you can refuse Medicare, avoid the Affordable Care Act, refuse to accept social security benefits, and home school your children. You can’t avoid the public school tax unless you squat in the woods, for even renters who own no property pay the school tax as part of their rent.

Ignorance prevails. We have the American Boobus (as H.L. Mencken called them) screaming “Keep the government out of my Medicare.” One local Oregon politician thinks the West Bank of the Palestinians is a financial institution.

No. we are not a communist country. How about fascist, where corporations own the government? That’s a different story.