Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (15 page)

Frankly, I don't know how Ann Landers does it day after day. The answers are easy but the questions are hard to think of.

I waste too much time getting lost and I'm tired of it! Road maps have got to improve. I thought they'd get better after gas stations stopped giving them away and started charging $1.50 for them, but they haven't.

Some people are better at reading maps than others but maps should be easier, especially for map illiterates like me.

Maps in countries like France, Germany and England are better than ours, but that's probably because those countries are smaller and people have had more centuries to find their way around them. I'd like to see a Chinese road map. I don't suppose they have them at all in Russia because no one is allowed to go anywhere.

You have to be sympathetic to U.S. mapmakers, I suppose. They have to get a long, narrow state like California on the same-shaped piece of paper as they put thin, wide Tennessee on. And what do you do with crazy-shaped states like Florida, New York and Texas? Ideally, for a mapmaker, states would all look like Colorado so they'd fit nicely on a page.

Mapmakers have plenty of problems. There isn't room to write the names of all the places that should be on the map and there isn't room for the road numbers. Roads cross each other and change names and most maps can't handle it. Say you're in the town of Crawfordsville, Indiana. The map you have is twenty miles to the inch. They start the
name of the town with
C
at a dot that represents it but by the time you drive to the end of all fourteen letters in C-R-A-W-F-O-R-D-S-V-I-L-L-E, you're halfway to I-N-D-I-A-N-A-P-O-L-I-S. It isn't the mapmaker's fault. We need a totally new system for making maps.

But these are all mapmakers' problems. We want answers so we can find our way around. For instance, I don't want one map where an inch represents ten miles and another map on which an inch represents one hundred miles. I want a standard reference so I can look and guess quickly how far it is from one city to another. Modern science has left road maps behind.

They've talked for years about some finding device for cars but can't seem to come up with it. I think it's science fiction.

What we need is a screen that can be mounted in some good place, like the back side of the sunshade, so the driver can see it easily. A small, bright light should indicate the present position of the vehicle … and the position of police speed-patrol cars in the area. With the press of a button that would be as simple as changing the station on the radio, you'd be able to select a map of the whole country, the state, the town or the block you're on.

The screen would show you the whole United States if you wished to plan a trip from San Diego to Baltimore by way of Madison, Wisconsin, or it would show you the name of the street three blocks down the road from where you are.

It also should be possible to press a button to get a list of hotels, motels and restaurants in any area. Asking for a list of restaurants to avoid would probably be asking for too much.

This electronic map might even include the phone book and the Yellow Pages. Why not? Is this the computer age or isn't it? What are we waiting for?

I'm tired of getting lost when I'm driving someplace. My car doesn't have any problem moving along faster than the speed limit but if I'm not going in the right direction, why do I want to go that fast?

Half the time on a map you can't tell a river from a superhighway. The mapmaker has the name of the Mississippi once up near Duluth, Minnesota, and doesn't have it again until way down near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The names of the cities go across the map but often the river names are printed up and down, the way the rivers run, and are hard to read.

It wouldn't do any harm to put a staff of smart people to work on nothing but figuring out a new way to fold a road map so you could
put it back the way it was when you unfolded it without hiring a Japanese gadget packer to do it for you.

Next to saving stuff I don't need, the thing I like to do best is throw it away. My idea of a good time is to load up the back of the car with junk on a Saturday morning and take it to the dump. There's something satisfying about discarding almost anything.

Throwing things out is the American way. We don't know how to fix anything and anyone who does know how is too busy to come so we throw it away and buy a new one. Our economy depends on us doing that. The trouble with throwing things away is, there is no “away” left.

Sometime around the year 500
B.C.
, the Greeks in Athens passed a law prohibiting people from throwing their garbage in the street. This Greek law was the first recognition by civilized people that throwing things away was a problem. Now, as the population explodes and people take up more room on earth, there's less room for everything else.

The more civilized a country is, the worse the trash problem is. Poor countries don't have the same problem because they don't have much to discard. Prosperity in the United States is based on using things up as fast as we can, throwing away what's left and buying new ones.

We've been doing that for so many years that 1) we've run out of places to throw things because houses have been built where the dump was, and 2) some of the things we're throwing away are poisoning the earth and will eventually poison all of us and all living things.

Ten years ago most people thought nothing of dumping an old bottle of weed or insect killer in a pile of dirt in the backyard or down the drain in the street, just to get rid of it. The big companies in America had the same feeling, on a bigger scale. For years the chemical companies dumped their poisonous wastes in the rivers behind the mills or they put it in fifty-gallon drums in the vacant lots, with all the old, rusting machinery in it, up behind the plants. The drums rusted out in ten years and dumped their poison into the ground. It rained, the poisons seeped into the underground streams and poisoned everything for miles around. Some of the manufacturers who did this weren't even evil. They were dumb and irresponsible. Others were evil because they
knew how dangerous it was but didn't want to spend the money to do it right.

The problem is staggering. I often think of it when I go in a hardware store or a Sears, Roebuck and see shelves full of poison. You know that, one way or another, it's all going to end up in the earth or in our rivers and lakes.

I have two pint bottles of insecticide with 5 percent DDT in them in my own garage that I don't know what to do with. I bought them years ago when I didn't realize how bad they were. Now I'm stuck with them.

The people of the City of New York throw away nine times their weight in garbage and junk every year. Assuming other cities come close to that, how long will it be before we trash the whole earth?

Of all household waste, 30 percent of the weight and 50 percent of the volume is the packaging that stuff comes in.

Not only that but Americans spend more for the packaging of food than all our farmers together make in income growing it. That's some statistic.

Trash collectors are a lot more independent than they used to be because we've got more trash than they've got places to put it. They have their own schedules and their own holidays. Some cities try to get in good with their trash collectors or garbagemen by calling them “sanitation engineers.” Anything just so long as they pick it up and take it away.

We often call the dump “the landfill” now, too. I never understood why land has to be filled, but that's what it's called. If you're a little valley just outside town, you have to be careful or first thing you know you'll be getting “filled.”

If five billion people had been living on earth for the past thousand years as they have been in the past year, the planet would be nothing but one giant landfill and we'd have turned America the beautiful into one huge landfill.

The best solution may be for all of us to pack up, board a spaceship and move out. If Mars is habitable, everyone on Earth can abandon this planet we've trashed, move to Mars and start trashing that. It'll buy us some time.

When the federal jury held the company that made Chesterfield and L&M cigarettes before 1966 partly to blame for the death of Rose Cipollone, it was striking at the very heart of our American way of life.

Rose died of lung cancer at age fifty-eight after smoking a pack and a half a day for more than forty years. The jury ruled that the Liggett Group, which must have been Liggett & Myers tobacco company once upon a time, knew cigarettes were bad for people and should have said so in their advertising. The company was ordered to pay Rose's husband, Antonio Cipollone, $400,000. The award was relatively low because the jury found that the tobacco company wasn't all to blame. It said Rose was 80 percent to blame herself for continuing to smoke after she knew the risk.

That seemed like a pretty reasonable conclusion for a jury to come to. I'm tired of everyone blaming someone else for everything that happens and I was ready to be indignant if the jury laid all the blame on the tobacco company. Anyone would have to be an idiot not to know smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes was bad.

The big news, though, was not who was guilty in this case. The big news was the jury's decision that advertising ought to be honest. Are they crazy?

The lawyer who won the case said the jury concluded the tobacco company was lying in its advertising. He pointed out that one ad for L&M cigarettes claimed they were
JUST WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED
and another for Chesterfields said
PLAY SAFE—SMOKE CHESTERFIELDS
.

The tobacco industry was pleased that it got only 20 percent of the blame but was nervous because the verdict in this jury case might bring on a flood of lawsuits from people dying of lung cancer.

This isn't what worries me. I'm worried not about the possible decline and fall of the cigarette industry, but about the effect the case will have on the advertising industry itself. Does this mean that in the future ads will have to be honest? Are they kidding? One of the things that makes America great is the unwritten understanding between advertisers and consumers that it's a lot of baloney.

Women know in their hearts that beauty products won't make them beautiful.

Men understand they'll never look like Jim Palmer in Jockey shorts.

We all know foreign countries don't look as exotic as the travel ads picture them.

If advertising has to be absolutely honest, does this mean that
GRANDMA'S ORIGINAL HOMEMADE MOLASSES COOKIES
would have to be made by Grandma at home?

Can you imagine how ads would read in newspapers or sound on television if they had to tell all? The classifieds would be hard hit:

JOB WANTED: INEXPERIENCED AND UNWILLING TO LEARN, LAZY HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT LOOKING FOR HIGH PAY FOR LITTLE WORK
.

The real estate ads would change:

HOUSE FOR SALE: TWO DRAFTY BEDROOMS AND ONE YOU COULD PUT A COT IN. TWO HALF BATHROOMS. BASEMENT LEAKS, FURNACE ABOUT SHOT. ON WOODED LOT IF YOU CALL TWO TREES A WOODED LOT
.

The secondhand-car ads would say something like:

FOR SALE: RUSTY
1981
PONTIAC. SEEN BETTER DAYS
. $4,300
OR BEST OFFER OVER
$2,000.
LOADED WITH GADGETS YOU DON'T NEED. GETS
14
MPG DOWNHILL. FRONT SEAT UNCOMFORTABLE ON LONG DRIVES. MISSING CIGARETTE LIGHTER
.