Now Uber Alles

In case nobody else has told you yet, the antiques business has died, victim of the highly contagious Wow Now virus spreading unchecked across America. Friends who've spent 40 years patiently purveying six and seven figure 18th Century pieces of American perfection described their most recent shows as "dismal", "disappointing" and "devastating. Nobody wants what we have."  On the opposite side of the country, a friend in the business of selling Asian folk antiques for 25 years said the past two years have been "dreary and discouraging. What am I going to do with all this stuff?" 

I feel their pain. I can't get rid of my great uncle's complete set of 19th Century gold rimmed Limoges china or sell the gold and gemstone jewelry my grandparents paid part of their fortune for. I can't even find a taker for two Cambodian sandstone statues that were supposed to have been "an investment." So much for the new sharing economy.

You may be thinking: My my, so what? No biggie. Who cares about antiques? That's so...old. I am thinking: this is huge. This is so new. Now what? We are drowning in hoopla and hyped up happiness about a new sharing economy that's going to revolutionize everything, and nobody tells you it's pretty damned picky and choosy about what you can share. Mostly just the stuff teenage boys want: a sleeping couch, a ride, elbow grease, and home delivery for everything, so they never have to deal with real people. Nobody wants to say to real people with wisdom and treasures: "Thank you for sharing."

America's obsession with shiny new has run amok, trampling the past and turning age into a leper nobody dares to touch. People are so afraid of being infected, the botox business is booming. Plastic surgery is the highest grossing medical profession. The hippest words of the day are baby talk: hoodie, wheelie, selfie, my bad.   

It's come to this: computers are allowed to have more and more useful memory, but grownups aren't welcome to have any. Haven't you noticed the only Beatles song you never hear replayed is I Believe in Yesterday. Really, who does that anymore? Everybody is too busy avoiding yesterday's ideas, heroes and arts like toxic waste. Remember how last month, Democrats couldn't bring themselves to utter the letters FDR or JFK. You can see how we are so over precedent and predecessors in all those recent Supreme Court Decisions. Last week the University of Maine announced it was axing its American and Franco-American studies programs to save money. Well, I will bet you this is the last school to toss history in the garbage. I know because I watch Jeopardy. I see how all those under 30 wunderkinds who instantly buzz for the name, label or title of every pop song and movie of the last decade or two are totally silenced by far more famous events or personalities before 1980. It just flabbergasts me how clueless those so-called smarties are about General Westmoreland, Walter Winchell, Fred Astaire and the OSS. 

Let me put this situation in terms I really understand: food. Our culture is propelled by the sort of people who refuse to eat and throw away leftovers. Leftovers! Often the best part of the meal!  Silly me who hungers for a leftover that's been on the table for 2,600 years. I spend 27 years trying to fathom that old Buddha's teachings, trying to adapt myself to authentic meditation practices, hand-me-downs in Tibet for at least 1,200 years. It's been a formidable struggle and now I discover a 30-something former fashion magazine editor and makeover maven spent a meditation week with Oprah and a month of mindfulness, and immediately morphed into a "spiritual entrepreneur." No sweat. She simply adapted the Dharma to herself, to have it her way like a hamburger--I'll take mine with ketchup and no onions-- and opened a drop-in, Buddha-free, time-sensitive meditation center where type As can calm down. It's in LA and it's called Unplugged. She sees it as the first of a chain. 

Well, I'd also call that unplugged.  Definitely. She has pulled the plug on the millennia of lamas and gurus and Rinpoches fiercely devoted to making sure we were handed down unpolluted Dharma. I see that as the end of a chain.

Don't get me wrong. I am Buddhist. I believe in Now. I try to live in the moment, carpe diem and all that. But Now has gone wild. I don't think the Buddha meant living in now as a child's tantrum against hand-me-downs. He didn't teach people to get obsessed with innovation, novelty, youth, freshness, interruption and disruption for its own sake--all new all the time.

New Age seems to mean nothing is allowed to last. Everything has to have an inviolable expiration date. Food, credit cards, drugs, warranties, operating systems, marriages, that Asian antique Shakyamuni Buddha. Sometimes expiration dates aren't stamped on stuff; you're just supposed to intuit. How embarrassing, one of those highly manicured and polished department store cosmetic cuties scrunched her face into a big Ooo after I confessed my lipstick was probably a year or two old. "You can't use that!" she exclaimed. When I scrunched my face into the big Ooo of Why?, she smiled brightly. "Because ... well, because...it's so old, it's probably no good any more. You need to change it every six months before it gets too full of germs and stuff."

Well, I am going to share something: as a Buddhist I appreciate impermanence, but since it hasn't killed me yet, I use the same germy lipstick 'til it's used up. I'm even okay plugged into the original Buddha's instructions. I am so old age, I drive my tech genie bonkers by working on a six-year-old computer that he considers antique. Worse, I refused to upgrade my IOS from 6 because it was working just fine when the new IOS 7 was busy crashing everybody else's iPad and phone. I didn't even jump right up to 8 when it was introduced. Hell, my iPhone is 2 years old and six weeks ago, I was due for an upgrade, but why rush to ditch something familiar that works just fine on trusty old IOS 6?

I know in this age of short term profiting, long term thinking makes me a freak. So pity me, please. I suffer from a handicap. I grew up when things were built to last. I came of age when tomatoes weren't the only acceptable heirloom. Mad Men era revelations about planned obsolescence unleashed culture shock. Who suspected Chrysler was making cars doomed to die at 60,000 miles just so they could sell more of them? Who knew that would lead to cosmetic counter clerks dissing my lipstick just so they can manipulate me into buying a new one.

Of course, you could say: Ho hum, no biggie. Planned obsolescence was not exactly a new idea of the '50s and already 2600 years ago the Buddha taught impermanence. You'd be right. My eyes are failing and my hormones have evaporated. That's planned obsolescence right there. Impermanence was in the original Mom and Pop business plan and it's worked out so well, Mother Nature and Father Time are still turning out products not carelessly made in China. For instance, me. I am the result of long term strategy and antiques. My parts that broke down lasted 50 and 70 years. They may be gone, but I'm still here, running smoothly. I was built to last a lifetime.

Or so I thought. With all these antique hating newbies so busy disrupting, instead of a lifetime, instead of the high life or the good life or the examined life, whatever you want to call fourscore years and ten, I now have a shelf life. Old is the New Fat. I saw that headline. My eyesight is not that bad. I saw: Old is the New Fat. Here's the story: Being grownup is dreadful; don't go there.  Everybody is ducking from dignity and running from anything that indicates age, because unless you happen to be a bottle of wine, being old makes you contemptible. You are so not Now, nobody wants to be seen with you. You are just a fathead.

Well, what to do? I have gained experience, added huge amounts of memory and pumped up my perspective. And now people dread having to sit next to a fathead like me in the ever shrinking coach cabin.

The eye doctor says I have cataracts, and I see them ruining my night vision. But cataracts are not blinders. They have not clouded my long view or blocked my wide angle perspective. I see context-- the fat. That makes my thinking nowhere near so thin or nearsighted as a 25-year-old's. I don't have a problem with that, but apparently twenty-five-year-olds do. The new young male editor of the Internet daily I used to opine for passed on my proposed piece showing fashionably novel and highly trumpeted services like Uber and Airbnb to actually be nothing new, just iterations of traditional ways to solve the age-old "servant problem."

What to do? Twenty-five-year-olds don't want me to share the news that they're not unplugged after all. They're just another moment in a continuum, not sky splitting, Earth-shattering special creatures after all. When tomorrow is now, they're going to be antiques.




~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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