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Most authorities in such matters credit the writer and
social critic Tom Wolfe with coining the phrase the Me
Decade
to describe the 1970s. It was a time when people
seemed focused on themselves and their personal
desires.
Along that line, the current decade might well be
remembered someday as the My Decade,
because it's
pretty hard to get through a day without seeing a reference
to MyThis
or MyThat.
That's true even if you just want to relax your mind by
minimizing its activity and watching television. The other
night I saw a promotion for a Denver station that now calls
itself My20
and offers programs from
MyNetworkTV.
As nearly as I can tell, this trend started before the
current decade, with the release of Microsoft Windows 98
eight years ago. Its default screen showed an icon for
My Computer,
and I'd never seen anything like that
before.
At first I thought it was an effort at honesty, in that
Bill Gates probably views every computer in the world as
my computer
and should thus control it. Then I
realized it was more like a collection of utility programs,
and it really had nothing to do with who owned the
computer.
No real problem there, but this keeps getting worse. On
a Windows XP machine, to get to photos retrieved from a
digital camera, the path is something like C:\Documents
and Settings\Ed\My Documents\My Pictures\My Kodak.
My
goodness, that's a lot to type.
I know, the modern computer interface has you pointing at icons, rather than typing commands. This is not progress. Historians say the alphabet was a great improvement on hieroglyphics as a way to communicate, and here we are going backwards.
Anyway, Microsoft seems to have started the modern My trend, and it will doubtless get worse when Windows Vista is released one of these days. It's surprising that the company hasn't started suing other parties for infringing on its intellectual property.
Potential targets might be the MySpace
website,
which allows you to introduce yourself to millions of
strangers, not all of whom necessarily harbor benevolent
intentions. Cyberspace also offers MyYahoo
and
MyAOL.
Time Magazine just headlined an article My
Person of the Year.
The Sunshine State promotes itself
at MyFlorida.com.
But since MyCrosoft has yet to
threaten litigation, others might pick up on the trend.
For instance, the U.S. Army used to recruit with the
slogan Be all you can be.
Then it switched to An
Army of One,
which makes absolutely no sense -- an
army, by definition, is a group. After failing to meet its
recruiting goals in 2005, the Army just adopted a new
slogan: Army Strong.
Don't you think it would do better with MyArmy
now? Vice-President Dick Cheney could appear in recruiting
commercials: Join MyArmy, and you can be in the thick of
hot Baghdad action that makes Grand Theft Auto look like a
Sunday School picnic. To this day, I regret that I had
other things to do 40 years ago, and I missed out on all
the excitement. Don't let time pass you by. Join MyArmy
today. Be part of MyIraq or maybe even MyIran.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says the President
doesn't need congressional authorization to tap phones
without a warrant, but Congress should pass it anyway. We
might quit noticing such anomalies if he promoted the
program as MyInfo, the important tool the President
needs to find terrorists, and all it takes is a little
sharing. And no registration is necessary -- you're
automatically enrolled.
Our real-estate industry seems to be doing well enough
these days, but it might do even better with MyColorado
-- your own expansive half-acre ranch with stunning views
of snow-capped peaks.
Certain lame-duck senators and representatives could pay their campaign bills with MyCongress. Contribute handsomely and you could get MyTaxBreak or MyEarMark, poviding you act quickly while they're still in office and in session.
There are a lot of other My possibilities. Circulate
petitions in Colorado and hold MyReferendum to pass
MyAmendment. The homeless can enroll in MyShelter, which
could be a cardboard box. We could stop referring the
the uninsured
and instead say they're participating
in MyHealthCare.
Why all this My? Perhaps we've finally reached that
long-stated Republican goal of creating an ownership
society.
Or at least we can pretend by joining
MyTrend.
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