Human Meme

The president woke early at his ranch. It was August 11, 1984, a Saturday, and Ronald Reagan had his weekly radio address to tape. Before the taping he did what broadcasters do. He leaned into the microphone and gave the engineers a voice level. What he gave them was a joke. He kept a straight face and announced that he had signed legislation outlawing Russia forever. Then came the punch line. "We begin bombing in five minutes." The technicians laughed. The networks had a line open, and they recorded it all. Within days the tape had circled the planet. American officials scrambled to assure the Kremlin that a joke was not policy. The Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Soviet forces in the Far East went on alert for half an hour. In his diary the president wrote that he had been doing a voice level, with no thought that anyone beyond the few people in the room would ever hear it.

The product was a pain reliever made by one of the most trusted companies in America. Months earlier, at a plant in Puerto Rico, two lots of it had failed a laboratory test: the caplets might not dissolve properly, which means, in the plainest reading, the medicine might not work. Nobody had been hurt. Nothing had been reported. And the company had told the government it would get the product back. It just never used the word recall. It called the program a purchase project. The word recall was the thing being avoided, because a recall is public, and public is expensive. The whole thing came apart because of a piece of paper.

I want to tell you about a winter in 1868. In Concord, Massachusetts, a thirty-five-year-old woman named Louisa May Alcott sat at a desk her father had built and wrote a novel for money, because the family needed the money. She wrote it fast, about ten weeks, and she wrote about four sisters who were her own sisters. She did not expect much from it. The first printing vanished. The presses ran all fall. Then the letters started. Thousands of letters, from girls all over the country, and every letter asked the same question. Who does Jo marry? Alcott put her answer in her journal, and it is the funniest and angriest sentence in American publishing.

Two friends can make each other laugh with five words. Not the blue umbrella... again. One of them says it at a party, or across a booth in a diner, and the other one is gone. Helpless. People turn around to look. Now try to explain it to a third person. Give yourself twenty minutes. You will need the wedding, and the wind that afternoon, and the usher with the borrowed umbrella, and what the umbrella did at exactly the wrong moment in front of exactly the wrong guest.

That prosecutor, in a county of two or ten thousand people, knows the family of the dead man, or knows people who do. The folder on his desk has a box for everything the road could measure and no box for what the trooper believed. Nothing in the design asks his question. Nobody is paid to go sit in a widow's kitchen and ask whether her husband meant it. The certificate says accident, and the certificate is lawful, and the certificate may even be true. The machine did not fail that night. It ran perfectly, and it produced an accident, because an accident is what the machine was built to produce when the evidence is thin and the family is grieving and the town is small.