TRUE GRIT
I was three quarters of the way through writing a difficult column on Steve Jobs, feverishly trying to put on paper what I found as a very odd, group-think lionization of the Apple cofounder. But as I began mixing themes about technology’s worrisome future effect on the global workforce, the overpowering ego that drives today’s business icons, and our unnatural, deep emotional feelings toward digital devices, smoke began to pour from my ears as my brain, like an underpowered CPU on an outdated motherboard, tried to process information and spit out sentences that portrayed what I was feeling.
I had what I thought was a great headline: ‘The Inhumanity of a Technological Tomorrow: Deifying Digital Devices and Demonizing the Downtrodden.’ But as I began to spin off into unorganized comparisons between the love lavished on iPods and iPads and the increasing ease with which we shamefully treat our nation’s poor like expendable parasites, I felt the column deteriorating into something between a rant and an uncohesive collection of random thoughts. I was trying to drill down to the dynamic devaluation of human labor coming in an age when technology replaces human tasks at lower costs and without the messy emotions, health care expenses, and unpredictability of a human workforce.
Somehow that shift was all summed up for me by the way our society worshipped Steve Jobs after his death. The man’s messy human contradictions — abandoning his first daughter to welfare after being put up for adoption himself; professing to espouse the anti-materialism of Buddhist thought while becoming the most successful peddler of material goods in our recent history; stomping on free speech whenever it interfered with a well-choreographed Apple product launch while building products that were supposed to aid in the free flow of information — were swept under the rug as Jobs turned himself into the human equivalent of one of his products: sleek, iconic, and appealing.
Just then, in a caffeine-addled haze of researching the 19th century Luddite movement and wrestling with how to use a powerful quote about Jobs that read ‘so bad to people, but so good with products,’ a book dropped onto my desk. As is the case in many small newsrooms, books and photos and information of the most mundane and the most intriguing sort regularly float through the office. This particular title — ‘The Short, Short Hitchhiker’ — caught my eye.
Being thoroughly demoralized with my Steve Jobs column, I grabbed the book, flipped it open, and hoped a little reading might allow my mental CPU to cool.
The ‘Short, Short Hitchhiker,’ true to its title, is a collection of autobiographical travel tales about a four-foot-tall transient who froze his legs off during a Cleveland winter and then proceeded to spend his life bumming rides around the country.
The story was the antithesis of the Jobs’ biography. There were no corporate boardrooms, technological innovation, or obsessive fixation on minute design details of the newest digital devices. Hitchhiker Stanley Gurcze’s story was a human tale stripped down to its most elemental.
Oddly enough, in between bumming rides and raking leaves for enough scratch to buy a sandwich, Gurcze started what he describes as a ‘nonprofit roadside counseling service,’ where the homeless, double-amputee vagabond would sit and listen to all the problems of the people he encountered.
What I liked about the ‘Short, Short Hitchhiker’ was the honesty and pure humanity that filled the book. Without any business ambition, image to uphold, or salesmanship, Gurcze put pen to paper to tell simple stories that intersected the lives of the wealthy and the vagrant in our society.
In a country more and more fractured along the lines of wealth and money, where battle lines are being drawn between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, and where technological advancement may one day produce an article-writing computer that spits out superb True Grit columns in half the time and with none of the mental anguish, human stories about who we are (not what we own, what we make, or what we sell) are as relevant as ever.
In the coming months, millions more people will pick up and read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs than will even hear of the ‘Short, Short Hitchhiker.’ And millions of people will parrot a line about how Jobs revolutionized our lives, without ever questioning whether listening to music on an iPod and being able to surf the web on a phone really was that great of an advancement in our society.
The genius of Apple was a genius of marketing — the powerful feelings and emotions we were manipulated into having for a computer, tablet, or music device. I respect Jobs for what he accomplished in the business world, but I prefer the genius of a man who lost both of his legs as a child but never lost his love for life, and spread it around to the many more fortunate motorists who found him sticking out his thumb on the side of some lonely Western road.
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