You could probably feed the world's hungry for a year with the advertising budget Cingular Wireless has unleashed on TV Land in recent weeks. Cingular's commercials feature a Tony Danza look-alike doing the Ickey Shuffle. Some even feature quotations from various luminaries, including Shakespeare ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"), Martin Luther King, Jr. ("Free at Last") and Homer Simpson ("D'Oh").
The company's mission statement reads, "We believe that, given a chance, human expression can change the world." Pretty serious stuff from a cell phone provider. And from this conviction we are to believe that Cingular is committed to "the celebration of your own self expression," according to the company's Web site.
A cell phone user is no doubt engaged in some form of "self expression," although it is not the sort King's "Free at Last" proclamation invokes. Rather, most cell phone users "express" something more along the lines of "I am so totally mad at my boyfriend," or "I'll pick up some toilet paper on the way home."
This is not exactly in the spirit of Jefferson and Washington. I doubt that the First Amendment ever will be invoked in defense of the oppressed cell phone soccer mom.
Years ago, the phone began its trek from private spaces to the public realm. What were once removed conversations in the privacy of homes are now both dialogues and pairs of one-sided broadcasts.
So, as assorted conversations fill our ears as though they were intended for us to hear, cell phone monologues could perhaps be considered a type of artistic endeavor or a form of social protest. With just a little twisting, that tedious exchange can become trenchant, world-changing self-expression.
For example, the starving poet might think my love handles are well-wrought commentaries on sexual objectification when I go "skins" on the basketball court.
And my dirty laundry piles may beg my house mates to reconsider arbitrary bourgeois standards of personal hygiene.
But Cingular's attempt to link itself to an American ideal certainly is not peculiar (Alltel, another wireless provider, promises in its slogan, "It's your freedom").
Moreover, I doubt consumers really think they can "change the world" by employing this burgeoning cultural accessory (though the folk at Cingular might).
What Cingular implicitly recognizes is that what once was never left the privacy of the home or office no longer is necessarily so.
It is the age of experiencing other peoples' laundry - the dirty, the clean, and even the marginally recyclable that barely passes the sniff test.
I'm sure I'm not alone in proclaiming that I'm really not interested in other people's laundry. Standing in line for a cup of coffee is not "Survivor: Charlottesville," and I didn't tune in to see the drama of someone else's life unfold before me. I just wanted a cup of coffee.
The only thing more depressing than a silent mental cataloguing of the mundane details of my life is hearing those of someone else's advertised on top of it. I have yet to hear an interesting cell phone monologue.
Either these people are too selfish to notice their imposition or so deluded they think I care about some discounted version of "Entertainment Tonight" for the Average Joe on the bus ride home.
As Thoreau laments in "Walden," "But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools." It seems as though merely because cell phones exist, we must own them. Furthermore, because of this ownership, we must use them prodigiously.
And finally, and most disturbingly, this ownership must be on display. The cart and the horse have been befuddled. Companies promise freedom, but hope for our enslavement.
Without a doubt, these phones are useful as insurance against contingency. But as a friend of mine noted, they're getting to be more like RVs - a nuisance to everyone except their users.
I have this terrible vision of a thousand Tony Danzas break dancing on J.P.A., all "expressing" themselves. Or maybe it's a hoard of young women calling each other to "express" that she is walking from one class to another.
It's a wonder we made it so far without cell phones. Books and traditional speeches suddenly seem anachronistic.
How was "Moby Dick" ever written or women's suffrage granted if not for magical, ringing, vibrating pieces of plastic? We have been liberated for expression; we have been freed from the confines of courtesy.
The next time I hear someone's phone playing "Jingle Bells" in a movie theater I won't get mad. And I won't get even. As he crafts that subtle phrasing, "Hey...watching a movie...no...yes...you suck...no, you suck ...totally...later," I'll think of Dr. King and Susan B. Anthony and thank God that free speech is alive and well in America.
Now, let's start wearing our underwear on the outside.
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