Small Worlds and Everyday Heroes

By William Kamowski

The informal essays of Small Worlds and Everyday Heroes follow our daily quests across the city, highway and airport, through mountains, cinemas and the potholes of popular culture. With a satirical smile, this potpourri questions the familiar valuables from our everyday lives—our heroes, myths and dreams, our politics, media and materialism. In other words, the stuff we put our faith in and, so, the stuff we sometimes lose faith in, including the technology that has yet to rescue us. Small Worlds winks to readers who like to laugh at themselves while shaking their heads at others who share their foibles—readers who prefer to savor the serious in its lighter flavors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098340858

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by William Kamowski

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First printing, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-09834-084-1 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-09834-085-8 (ebook)

Published by BookBaby, Pennsauken, NJ

For Magdalen

Table of Contents

Foreword

Small Worlds

Cell Phones and Cigarettes

Save Money, Live Better

Fishing the Interstate

Jesus, the Pedestrian, and the Least of Our Brethren

Heroes One and All

Our Everyday Heroes

Remembering Armistice Veterans Day

Blood Lust, Mythic Heroes, and the Peace of Beowulf

Everyday Quests and Dreams

Back to the Dream

Shakespeare, Seattle, and the Enduring Heroine

of Romantic Comedy

Small Heroes in No Place Like Home

Afterword

Foreword

A student in my English Literature class was shocked to hear me say that I fell asleep reading a Jane Austen novel, and still more amazed at my explanation: For some of us, bad books are too irritating to fall asleep over. We need a good book, one that’s casual, comfortable.

Small Worlds and Everyday Heroes is a casual, comfortable assortment of thoughts for any backyard hammock, and—well, you decide if it’s good enough to nod off with. It features familiar valuables from our everyday lives: our heroes, myths and dreams, our politics, media and materialism. In other words, the stuff we put our faith in and, so, the stuff we sometimes lose faith in, including the technology that has yet to rescue us. The essays in this book follow our everyday quests across the city, highway and airport, through mountains, cinemas and the potholes of popular culture.

The social critiques collected here might not be for everyone, but they may appeal to the editorial page reader, the moviegoer, the part-time romantic in us, the history buff, the poet needing a day off from verse, and perhaps the crossword devotee who seeks an alternative version of across and down. Small Worlds speaks to readers who like to laugh at themselves while shaking their heads at others who share their foibles, and to readers who expect entertainment from serious subjects.

When it comes to an assortment like this one, no one has improved upon the advice of Geoffrey Chaucer who offered a collection of something for everyone six centuries ago: If one offering or another does not appeal to your taste, Turn over the leaf and choose another tale. You would surely have better odds with Chaucer, but every book’s a gamble, and this one likely has something comfortable to fall asleep over.

Small Worlds

Cell Phones and Cigarettes

I can quit anytime.—Anonymous Addict

When Sir Walter Raleigh imported lung cancer from the New World to Western Europe, he meant better than he did. A knowledgeable herbalist, Raleigh thought that tobacco could purge the body of harmful humors. His New World explorers reported to him that American Indians used it in sacrifices to placate the gods. But the leaf that Sir Walter had popularized at Queen Elizabeth’s court, and that contributed to his own popularity, later drew upon him the anger of Elizabeth’s successor, King James, a self-appointed authority on witchcraft who thought that tobacco was an instrument of the Devil. Raleigh’s intentions were divided between savoring the pleasures of tobacco and pleasing the whims of Queen Elizabeth and, later, King James. He had no more inkling of spreading disease, not to mention an addiction, than did the sailors of his predecessor Christopher Columbus when they allegedly imported syphilis to the homeland.

Like Raleigh, the developers of asbestos fire retardants, who saved our homes from burning when modern beneficiaries of Raleigh left their cigarettes unattended, meant better than they did. But they, too, gave us lung disease, though in a safer environment less threatened by things that ignite and uncomplicated by the pleasures of volatile monarchs. The tainted benefits of asbestos are age-old actually. First-century Roman author Pliny the Elder thought that asbestos provided protection against spells, though both he and the ancient Greek geographer Strabo also noticed that asbestos caused lung problems for the slaves who worked with it in garment making. So it’s at least a bit ironic that a form of asbestos was used in the earliest cigarette filters in the 1950s, presumably to prevent certain toxins from reaching the lungs.

Scholars of hindsight, we look back on these ill-informed innovations as obvious menaces. Surely the intelligentsia of the European Renaissance should have known that inhaled smoke was a threat to the human lung. Surely the twentieth-century miner should have known the same of asbestos. But, no, all knowledge appears and disappears in the lenses of what we want to know or think we need. In the interim before enlightenment, we enjoy the benefits of our poisons.

So, in that spirit of compromise, we quietly assumed that the radioactive aura, which had disfigured and poisoned thousands of Japanese, had spared the health of the Americans it had delivered from war. Like Raleigh with tobacco, the earliest entrepreneurs in nuclear benefits brought us comfort before cancer, though one might argue that, unlike Raleigh, they did not mean better than they did.

Alexander Graham Bell meant well too and, in many ways, did even better than he meant when he developed the telephone. Few inventions have been cherished as much as the telephone. It rescued the sanity of the farm wife in Nebraska in 1920; it has punctuated Christmas dinners across the miles across a century; it once provided, with its booths, a place for Clark Kent to change clothes and for the rest of us to get out of the rain. Best of all, though, it heralded the ultimate blessings of the cell phone—now the social weapon of choice from third graders to seniors in the third phase of assisted living.

But the pleasures of innovation come with both a charge and a surcharge, and few such pleasures were weighted with more charges than the cell phone as it surpassed the landline in daily use. There were charges if you ventured into insidious options outside your plan or exceeded your infinite minutes by downloading a dozen measures of Springsteen for a new ringtone, or sending miniphotos of the massive Grand Canyon. And there were consequences as well as charges if you slipped up and texted your hubby (who was not one of your faves) instead of your lover. No problem nowadays, though. In this enlightened second generation of the mobile phone, we dodge those extra charges tacked on to that archaic, deceptive $49.99 monthly plan by signing up for the $149.99 plan with unlimited data for Mom, Dad, Nana, and the twins.

Yet these costs are, after all, minor matters, and surely our wireless phones house no unseen demons of disease like those lurking in tobacco, asbestos, or nuclear deliverance. For years, we have been assured that the radiation from a cell phone is non-ionizing, too low in energy to be concerned about—as long as men, to avoid the remote chance of sterility, didn’t carry a cell in their front pants pockets. Well, yes, there were disturbing concerns raised some years ago, by a few of our scientists, about tumors inside the thinner skulls of young cell phone users, and a new trickle of low-level worries still seeps into the back pages of one newspaper or another every so often. But remember how long it took for global warming to become a fact. Besides, glioma, the brain cancer most commonly mentioned in studies of cell phone radiation, is rarer than auto accidents caused by mobile phone use.

Still, if you’re nervous about the facts becoming unsatisfactory, you can check the specific absorption rate (SAR) of radiation for your own brand of cell phone. If you don’t like or understand your SAR, you can purchase the protection of a stylish ZEROFON ceramic bug that attaches to the shell of your mobile to reduce the radiation absorbed by your body. For those who have heard that phone radiation robs their bodies of vital energy, the Bio-Electric Shield should keep them energetic. And for the worried and pregnant, a Belly Armor Blanket will shield from everyday radiation that precious unborn text messager. All these at sale prices online. Order now from your mobile.

It’s also been claimed (as well as denied) that the brain of a heavy cell user metabolizes more sugar, but is that a bad thing really—a little more sweetness in the personality’s point of origin? Surely we can take the good with the bad, and one of the good things about the controversy over cell phone dangers is that it gives us options, all from inconclusive but potentially accurate studies. If you want to know that cell phones are dangerous, read Microwave News online. If you want to remain undecided, read the National Cancer Institute’s Fact Sheet. If you want to know that cell phones are safe, read anything published by the phone industry, or by the anti-conspiracy theorists who think that the public is simply being worried by unsubstantiated information.

Why worry anyhow? The majority of reviewers who have examined the scientific studies on cell phone health dangers affirm that none of these studies have yet proven any significant dangers from mobile phone microwaves. And because non-users of cell phones are becoming such rare beings, very soon we will not have enough of them left to form a control group for a reliable study to substantiate any health dangers from our mobiles. So, we’re quite safe, really.

For those who must worry, be aware that safe cell practices (which almost nobody is aware of) have long ago been prescribed: stand still while you talk to reduce your phone’s radiation emissions; text instead of talk (that’s now working well for most of us); use a hands-free device; or turn on your speaker. Whatever you do, don’t press your phone to your ear to hear better.

But surely such concerns over possible physical dangers are minor matters when we consider the mobile phone’s obvious value in emergencies, along with its many other benefits to our personal, social, and professional lives.

For instance, the cell phone has enabled us to overcome traditional physical handicaps. It has done wonders especially for the manual dexterity of fat men—or men with fat fingers. Since the invention of the typewriter, countless women have shown