Aluminum and Steel

One of the most striking things about the current group of fundamentalist thinkers who dominate the media is how little regard they have for what is literally true. It’s as if their argument that everything described in Genesis actually occurred allows them to say anything they like about things not included in the holy book.

The separation of what one wants to be true from what, in my undergraduate days, my philosophy student friends used to call really real reality has become so commonplace, I sometimes wonder how people manage to drive home safely. The laws of physics that state two objects can’t fill the same space at the same time still prevail, no matter how optimistic the passer.

A couple weeks ago, my boss’s eighty-some-year-old mother was working on making a rent sign. I had bought the white metal blanks, she had had a stencil made, and her son’s foreman had painted the signs. She discovered she would need to buy several sets of self-sticking numbers to get enough zeros for the prices, and was wondering what would be cheaper.

The foreman suggested refrigerator magnets.

She answered they were too expensive.

I looked at them both and said it’s aluminum.

They looked as me as if to say "so," and returned to the pros and cons of using magnets.

I thought, how do I explain grade school science to a woman raised to be a flapper and a young man raised in another country?

I can still vaguely remember some boy bringing two of those gray and red horseshoe magnets to school and showing them attracting screws and repelling each other. The lesson, no doubt, was reinforced by Mr. Wizard.

The magic remains. Last summer I was in a mineral store with a friend, and there was a box labeled with the name of some iron ore, perhaps lodestone. Naturally, I wanted to know. The store owner knew his customers and had placed a magnet next to the box. Now I know.

I suppose the combination of cartoons and advertising that show things like sponges attracting and unattracting spills destroy the wonder of magnets for very small children. Perhaps they learn to use the refrigerator decorations before they can sense the physical attraction when the magnet gets close to the door and, even if they let go, will attach.

The virtual world of the media, the familiarity of the commonplace destroy the sense of wonder that made iron workers so important to early man. It’s a link with a very ancient past that’s being lost.

The woman’s next idea was using a magic marker and turpentine. I didn’t even want to consider explaining the properties of powder coating or surface adhesion or any of the other aspects of physics that made that a questionable idea, and so just shouted back "Cheap, cheap, cheap!"

After they left, I took a magnet from the steel file case and put it near the white frame where spots of red showed through. The excitement still exists when the power of attraction takes over. Then I put it on the sign and watched it slide to the floor.

My world view was reified. Aluminum’s still aluminum and steel’s still steel, and all the blathering otherwise won’t change those facts.