Angel of the Net

Bill Gates is showing us the road ahead to oblivion

opinion by John Bennett, Free Press contributor

n the "Pages" section of People magazine, while waiting in an office for something to be done or someone to call my name, I saw a picture of Bill Gates standing in front of a tree with a column of print under his feet, a gangly four-eyed Bill, preposterously rich, a smug look on his face.

What's Bill doing, I asked myself, standing in front of a tree? Image-building? Like, relax! The microchip isn't the enemy of nature.

The column of print was all about Bill's book, The Road Ahead. Too bad this guy wasn't a basketball player in high school, I thought, the crowd cheering his every move. Too bad, too, that Hitler never made it as an artist. Too bad, while we're at it, that Einstein wasn't abandoned as a baby to a wolf pack. We might have averted Hiroshima. Toned down World War II.

Piss and moan all you want, says Bill in his book, the world is my oyster. You who scoff will eventually come crawling for access. The day is near when you will not be able to wipe your ass without first ordering toilet paper through the net.

There's a problem here, a big problem, but it's not Bill Gates, no more than Hitler was the problem, no more than Einstein. Symptoms all, warts and rashes. There is a cancer corkscrewing through the marrow of faith.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with, said Charles Bukowski. But did we ever have the potential to have it? And if so, do we still have that potential. Is it this potential that the cancer is eating away at?

Where did we begin to go wrong? Some ape touches his index finger to his thumb and it begins. In no time flat the hunter is down from the hills and plowing fields from dawn to dusk. Before he can reap the harvest, the farmer is driven from his farm into a big city, and finds himself burning the midnight fossil fuel on a graveyard shift. Decimation of forests, pollution of rivers and oceans, a few holes in the ozone. An atomic bomb dropped on a city of women and children, the destruction of the family unit, crime, drugs, prosperity, six o'clock news. And for the past 25 years, the future has been bouncing in the lap of the Information Age. Any old information. Our true potential has exploded into megabytes more numerous than stars in the sky.

The cancer has eaten its way through the hull of our potential and left us dead in the water, clinging to ersatz life rafts. The situation is infinitely worse than our shriveled imaginations can grasp. If no blood can be found on Bill Gates' hands, it's because all the blood was drained out of us long ago. What Bill scoops and devours is the beef-jerky remnants of our soul.

A picture of Bill Gates in slacks and sweater, hands in pockets, leaning casually against an old-growth tree, is an eyesore. An abomination. A travesty. And yet we take it in and rock it in our arms like a rag doll with its glass eyes missing. The son of God, we murmur. Our future. The road ahead.