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Jewish World Review Feb. 10, 2005 / 1 Adar I, 5765

Neil Steinberg

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Consumer Reports


Ding-dong, Ma Bell's dead doesn't have same old ring to it


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | We used to be afraid of the telephone company. Remember? There was a mystery and a menace about telephones, those heavy black objects that lived in your house though you didn't own them, crouching, dialed beasts tethered to the wall by a thick cloth-covered cord. When they rang, it was like a bomb exploding.


I'd worry that this view was some oddity of my own, if there weren't cultural evidence supporting it, such as "The President's Analyst," that 1967 comedy where James Coburn plays a psychiatrist pressed into treating the commander in chief. Behind all the conspiracies and plots was a force more malign than even the United States government: TPC, The Phone Company, working on some elaborate scheme to — if I recall — implant little phones in the hollow behind people's ears (talk about prescience. I think Motorola is launching behind-the-ear-implant phones next year).


Why then is there no joy in seeing Ma Bell, a shadow of her former self, sucked up by a Baby Bell for a paltry $16 billion? This should be a cause for celebration, like the fall of the Soviet Union.


But it isn't.


It's only sad, the elephant brought down by hyenas. Perhaps because — and this is a stretch, I know, but work with me — we are defined in part by our foes. Just as the Soviets were, in some ways, a more satisfying opponent than the current hazy pack of foaming terrorists, so Ma Bell, a shadowy international conglomerate secretly running everything, was a better source of alarm than some fly-by-night cell phone firm founded last week and going out of business next week yet somehow managing to rip you off in the interim.


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JWR contributor Neil Steinberg is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. His latest book is Don't Give Up the Ship: Finding My Father While Lost at Sea . Comment by clicking here.

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