Disposable, I.

A friend of mine complimented one of my blog posts yesterday--effusive praise, really. Of course I responded the way anyone who's been beaten for his entire life and for 5000 years before he was even born would respond. I answered with self-deprecation and an old one-liner. 

I thought that was that.

But then I started thinking about the one-liner. I said to myself, "I've been telling that joke for over 50 years." My deceased bestie, Fred, used to distinguish between long-time friends and friends for a long time. One is about length of time. The other about depth of soul. This was a depth of soul joke.

And then I thought some more. I thought some more about using a joke I've been telling for more than half a century. The same way I use references from Jeremy Bentham, Winston Churchill, Plutarch and Virginia Woolf. 

And then I thought some more. I thought about how my age peers and I, no matter what level of affluence or poverty we were raised in, grew up in what I'll call a "savers' culture." When we brought a cake home from the bakery--there were bakeries in those days--our mothers, no matter how Miltowned and Metracalled they were, saved the red and white striped baker's string, usually in a big inscrutable ball.

My mother--a child of World War II scrap drives, had us bundle old newspapers and magazines and haul them to the dump, where a bundle the size of a footlocker might earn us $2. Even as my father rose through the advertising ranks and emerged as the Chairman of a top-20 agency, she was getting glassware with her fill-ups at the gas station and was darning socks at night. We drank our frozen orange juice in glasses with Texaco logos.

It occurred to me we grew up saving everything. And that included vast stores of jokes, song lyrics, quotations from John Greenleaf Whittier, movie scenes, gravestone inscriptions, funny names and a trillion other pieces of old bakery string we could pull at and get ideas from.

I had read a book (this is an example of saving things) by an elderly former English professor who grew up during the depression on a lonely farm in Iowa. The book--which I recommend--was called "Little Heathens," and it gives you a Willa Cather view of life one-hundred years ago. The author recalls an inscription on the hog slaughterhouse near her house: "We use every part of the pig but the squeal."

I think good creativity is like that.

We use every synapse.

So we get into the habit of storing every synapse. We become savers, compilers, recallers. And those shards of life, like Etruscan pottery bits, re-form and re-mix to become ideas.

It's not fair for me, an old man, to disparage all of what I see today. Just as it's not fair for me to praise all those of my generation. 

Maybe the archivist brain that I have trained has always been rare and unusual. And certainly there's no reason for me to be able to recall not only the name of William McKinley's first Vice President (Garret Hobart) but the mnemonic legerdemain my mother crafted to help me remember it. (She remembered Attic --a garret-- coffee-grinder--a Hobart.)

Today we live in a toss-away culture. Everything from clothing to food to housing to technological breakthroughs are about as enduring as a shave with a cheap razor. Your stubble soon redoubles.

I wonder if ideas in today's disposable world are suffering the same sad fate.

About two years ago I had a phone call with yet another advertising luminary. He was the owner/creative head of a regional agency that played on the national stage. Like a lot of successful people, his age hadn't dimmed his love of work. 

David, not his real name, was gushing over a line he had written for a client. He said, "George, that was one of the best lines I ever wrote. And tomorrow, they'll swap it out for something else. It's instagram. That's the way it goes."

I worry that we have today too much Insta and no more Perma.

Too little saving and storing and too much obeisance to celebrity, the latest trends and whatever else passes for hot at the moment.

Our values are as long-lasting as a dust bunny. Brand truths are malleable. And our creative well is without depth, reference and resonance. We're not only numerically illiterate, we're painting by numbers.

What's more, because all of america now believes everything can be thrown out--we have a "single-use country"--why bother paying for anything? Most of what we make from fast-food to fast-ads is regarded as about as valuable as a Kleenex tissue. The best that can happen to one is it gets wadded up in a jean's pocket and lasts through the wash.

My advice to people?

Never throw anything out.