Man approaches counter in video store, holding copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Clerk (late 20s, somewhat nerdish looking)
I can help you with that.

Man
Before I get this one I have a question. Do you have any Buster Keaton? I checked Classics and Comedy, but I may have missed it.

Clerk, turning to terminal
Let me check. (Taps on the keyboard for a few seconds.) Buster Keaton. Is that the name of the movie?

Man
(Blinks. Blinks again. Doesn’t say what he’s thinking out loud, but does think it pretty loudly.) Mmmm, no, Buster Keaton is the director and performer.

Clerk
Oh. Sorry, but we can only search by movie title. We’ve got a big catalog down there you could look in.

Man
Try searching for The General. If you have anything, that would probably be it.

Clerk
(Tap, tap, tap….) No. Sorry. We have The General’s Daughter. That was a pretty good movie. Travolta was in it.

Man
Thanks anyway. (Puts Hitchhiker’s Guide on the counter.) I’ll get this.
_______________________

And it wasn’t even a Blockbuster.

I’m realistic. I don’t expect everybody in our culture to know everything. There’s a lot to know in the world. Too much, really. And on the subject of Keaton, I hardly know enough to get snooty. But we’re not talking about everybody. We’re talking about the staff at a movie store. Is is too much to expect that the staff at a movie store would have at least heard the name of one of the genre’s greatest filmmakers? How far are we going to lower the bar? Should all reporters know who Murrow was? Would it be okay if a baseball writer had never heard of Babe Ruth? What if a rock band had never heard of The Beatles? Should I trust a book review from somebody who didn’t know about Salinger, or go to see a play directed by somebody who’d never heard of Ibsen?

And what if the day arrives when I ask those questions, and not even a percent of the population has any clue what I’m raving about?

Will we start to worry when, just as we’re being put under for an open-heart procedure, we hear the surgeon say “scalpel please,” and the nurse beside him says “scalpel? Is that this little thing that looks like an eyelash curler?” Or as the plane is taxiing out to the runway, the pilot inadvertently keys the mic and we hear the co-pilot saying “what’s this joystick-looking thingie for?”

Of course, we’d never fall that far. But even so, I walked out of the video store thinking about how much we’ve lost culturally to the imperatives of cost-efficiency, to the bottom line. Cheap labor is the best kind, and dumb labor tends to be cheaper. And the gods know our educational system is doing all it can to provide American business with all the cheap labor it needs. And so, slowly but surely, the knowledge of Buster Keaton is not only slipping off the collective radar, but the awareness that knowledge is disappearing is slipping, as well.

Part of me thinks it would be great if sci/tech produced drugs and procedures that would extend my life, let me live to be a healthy, robust 300 years old. But I’m also painfully conscious that we are evolving towards a cultural consciousness that’s as numb and vapid as plant life. What would it be like being me in a world that’s exponentially more intellectually anesthetized than the one I already live in?

[sigh]

Fortunately, Hitchhiker’s Guide was pretty good. Keaton would have loved the Vogsphere scene, I imagine. And last night we went to see Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai in Charlotte. So while our sense of history is on life support, at least our creative spark isn’t dead.

That counts for something, at least.