Paul Jones
Can Canyon Man Keep Up His Fight Against Technology?
For the vast majority of people these days, the ways in which modern technology has made their lives more comfortable is taken almost for granted. Even those famous haters-of-all-things-technological, the Amish, or looking at shooing their horses with newfangled horseshoes that promise to deliver at least 50 miles from a bag of horse oats, at minimum.
And this is where the fabled ‘Canyon Man’ will need to make some serious adjustments. Everybody has one of these guys in the neighborhood. On Sunday mornings he’s usually out working under the hood of his 35-year-old vehicle that spews out a cloud of blue smoke whenever it’s turned on, but this guy will never trade it in or buy a new car, unfortunately.
It’s easy enough to pick this guy out around the neighborhood. For one, he has a leather watch band on his wrist that was given to him in appreciation of all his service after the end of World War I. For another, he is the guy who constantly rails against all these newfangled doodads that kids are sporting on their own wrists these days, claiming that they’re actually mind-enslavement tools.
Canyon Man is also uncomfortable with any sort of viewing technology when it comes to a television that doesn’t have something to do with a large picture tube sitting inside of a console that that resembles the log cabin that Abraham Lincoln probably went to law school in or something that Noah threw overboard once his ark made landfall.
It will be a fair bet — in fact, this kind of bet should be taken all the way to the bank — that Canyon Man won’t be coming anywhere near something like a custom LCD television at anytime in the near or far future. He also probably has never heard the words ‘DVD player’ (let alone ‘VCR’) in his life without uttering a string of profanities once those words had hit his auditory sensory organs, otherwise known as ‘ears.’
What is this man going to do when he is forced to confront the fact that TV is no longer beamed over the airwaves in the analog world? Will he become a ‘New Age Digital Man’ or will he refuse to give in to the inevitable when it comes to a new television and the LED backlight technology that makes one so slim that he would be afraid to approach it for fear that aliens would kidnap his brain?
For those standing on the sidelines — fully ensconced in all things digital and wondering why Canyon Man continues to tilt at his imaginary windmills — take comfort in knowing that he is out there acting somewhat like a canary in a coal mine, sitting in his 40-year-old beater mobile and sporting his studio 54 leisure suits. If aliens ever decide to baffle us through digital waves, he’ll be there to warn us that they’re on to us, and that’s a fairly comforting thought, it must be admitted.
Rev. Paul Jones “I Won’t Complain”
