“And the first question is for you, Karl Marx. The Hammers. The Hammers is the nickname of what English football team?” – Monty Python
I tried writing with a broken pencil once. It was pointless.
I have the same pencil since the Clinton administration. Not just in a junk drawer someplace, but as my daily use pencil at work. It’s not some yellow No. 2 pencil that I’ve sharpened until it’s a microscopic nub, rather, it’s a blue mechanical pencil, made in Japan. It’s a Cross® pencil, and has the original eraser but the eraser is so old that it looks more like a green petrified pterodactyl nipple rather than something that belongs in a book bag, and it’s harder than year-old chewing gum and just tears the paper rather than erasing anything.
I’ve used the pencil so much that the paint has worn off the brass and tin metal parts. It’s been dropped, chipped, and glued back together. The part that’s supposed to clip it to your pocket is loose and wobbles.
I won the pencil for a speech I gave during a corporate training program, about the time my career took off, so it has some special memories for me. I never intended to have this pencil forever, it just hung around at first. And then I noticed it was there on super-awesome days, like when I got divorced, or when I met The Mrs. And after six or so years, I decided I’d keep it.
I have a pen, too, but it’s really new. I got it in 2000, so I’ve only had it for 18 years.
Quirky, I know.
I mentioned my pencil to a friend, and she noted that she has rocks. From places. She knows where and when she got each one.
She mentioned that when she met her husband, he pointed out a closed box. It contained the rocks.
Husband to be: “What’s in that?”
“Oh, you’d better not look in there.”
Now, I believe, they’re in her garden. She knows where they are, and when she moves? She’ll crate up her rocks and they’ll go with her. Obviously, I understand.
A psychologist would call these “attachment objects.” Given the choice between my beat up, old Cross™ pencil and a brand-new and shiny Cross® pencil? I’d take my scuffed up ancient pencil any day. A new one could never replace a pencil I’ve had with me for most of my career. In my mind it has some sort of property ate differentiates it in some way from every other pencil on Earth.
This pencil is mine.
Another example – I bought a Blackberry® in 2008. Oh, sure, it was only six years old when I got a new Samsung™ in 2014. I know, how un-American of me. You should replace your cell phone weekly.
But I picked it up a few weeks ago. It felt . . . dead. It felt alien, inanimate.
I know, it’s not like the Blackberry© was a dancer beforehand, but still it wasn’t the same.
This tendency to place value on inanimate objects is greatest in people and groups that score highest in individuality, and lowest in collectivist-oriented people, so I imagine that Karl Marx went through pencils like nobody’s business.
And Venezuela? Don’t even get me started.
Perhaps that’s why socialist societies always fail: all of the means of production eventually become focused on generating replacement pencils?
