UP FRONT

By Richard Mandel
Editor in Chief

The 25¢ Future

The last days of March ’03 brought news of the passing of Robert B. Bourque, a minor luminary in the galaxy of designers. In the mid-sixties, this expert repairman of mechanical pinball machines and jukeboxes co-created Zoltan the Astrological Wizard, a popular novelty that graced East Coast amusement parks. Bourque’s contribution was in creating the complex mechanical workings of the machine, which presented the seer’s turbaned head inside a glass box, apparently peering intently into his crystal ball. Patrons would put in a quarter, select an astrological sign, and pick up an earpiece to hear the “voice of Zoltan” offer his prediction. (Those who have seen the Penny Marshall/Tom Hanks movie “Big” saw a very similar contrivance.)

How many of us would gladly forfeit two bits to know what is going to become of the manufacturing industry? Sadly for us, Zoltan could not predict his own replacement by video games that eventually moved users back home before the Great Glass Screen, to be X-Boxed into numbness with increasing violence. Nor did he drop metaphoric, Nostradamus-like hints that his replacement, and still more sophisticated machines, would be manufactured more cheaply on foreign soils and marketed in discount stores geared for families of unemployed factory workers.

And how are things faring where those products are being made? I recently spoke with friend and industrial PR veteran Miles Parker, who had an opportunity to visit China for two weeks immediately following this year’s NDES. The expansion of European and American business interests, combined with the economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, continues to make great changes in the landscape. Parker describes a land often characterized by “rapacious capitalism,” where the book of Mao has been replaced by the word of Warren Buffett. In gradual increases, such a change might work. But in a nation the size of China, with its restrictive ruling class and high proportion of rural farm communities, the attraction of the dollar and the deutschmark could propel the country forward at too fast a rate. Entrepreneurs have leapt into the business world like sharks in a feeding frenzy, the effect akin to transitioning from beer-drunk to crack addict overnight. Privatization of business has provided terrific opportunities for many people, who then affect the trappings of success in ways that broaden their distance from the working class. In this regard, the country will serve as an excellent model for social studies classes for years to come.

Parker’s trip took him for seven days to Guangzhou, the fifth-largest industrial city in China. The traveler from Rhode Island was awe-struck by many of the positive advances, particularly in architectural design, but appalled by the level of pollution spewing from local industries and vehicles. The haze he described recalled images of London in the late 1800s, or Mexico City in the ’70s. “I found myself dreaming at night about fresh air,” he said. Then he posed an interesting question. “Why is it,” he mused, “that in a nation where anything can be made cheaply, they can’t be bothered with installing even modest pollution controls?”

Perhaps the Chinese entrepreneur is too caught up in the business juggernaut to be concerned. It doesn’t help that so many products in Europe and America are dependent on China’s low production cost — I challenge you to enter a room today outside of a museum that doesn’t have at least one item made in China. Industrial history already has demonstrated what happens when social welfare and ecology are ignored for expediency’s sake. I wonder how long it will take the Chinese to learn this lesson, and what will happen when it all finally hits the bamboo fan.

Anyone got a quarter?