Tower of Babble:
Tawk is cheep

I saw my neighbor walking on a busy downtown Philly shopping street with a cell phone glued to her ear. That surprised me since she's far from a teenager. So engrossed was she in her conversation, which obviously was of such stunning import, she didn't even notice me, let alone tender even the briefest of greetings.

Oh, I tried to say hello to her, really I did. Normally I'd rather die before being rude or impolite to anyone. But hey, were she not 50ish and plump, with her compulsively neat suburban-matron coif, I might have mistaken her for a copycat version of the suspected, recently apprehended "Cell Phone Bandit" and turned her in to the FBI.

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Such insouciance – robbing a quartet of banks while continuously chatting on a cell phone glued to her ear – deserves canonization with its own concomitant Reality-TV series.

I admit I consider it a successful day when I don't see people on sidewalks going around talking to themselves in public. Usually that means I must travel to faraway places with strange-sounding names, like New Mexico, where the entire population of the state hovers around the 2-million mark. To me, it's really disconcerting, how we've become a Nation of Natterers, and no one seems to think there's anything wrong with that.

Not me, of course. Love me, love my landline. I remain staunch in resisting this cellular technology, fascinating as it is. What can't wait until you get home? Just about everything. Except, perhaps, a phone call from my fondest friend, "Freddy from Fresno," not his real name.

While we are in frequent telephone touch, Freddy and I, right now he doesn't have a cell phone either – not because he's opposed to them. Heck, no! Freddy swears cell phones are indispensable during highway emergencies. Maybe so. But didn't humankind successfully live with out them for centuries?

Weeeellllll, when you come right down to it, cell phones function like technological umbilical cords – which explains why some of us are so, um, attached to them.

And I do know one of the most obnoxious functions of cell phones is not how they can secretly take your picture, but how they have obliterated privacy, making what should be quiet and personal and private quite public and in your face. In short, they accelerate social change, and not for the better.

So some of us Neo-Luddites strike back. "Dr. Meg Briggs" the New York State psychotherapist, not her real name, has been known to loudly thank cell-phone mutterers for sharing their "confidential" information with her. Even I have somewhat charitably alerted cell-phone gabbers they risk brain tumors with their intemperate use of this seductive technology.

For those of you who are fans of biblical revelation, I resurrect the ancient tale of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) – not to be confused with the Leaning Tower of Pisa:

Now the entire earth was of one language and uniform words. And it came to pass when they traveled from the east, that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly" so the bricks were to them for stones, and the clay was to them for mortar.

And they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top reaching to heaven, and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands upon the face of the entire earth." And the Lord descended to see the city and the tower that the sons of man had built. And The LORD said, "Lo! [they are] one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do? Come, let us descend and confuse their language, so that one will not understand the language of his companion."

And the Lord scattered them from there upon the face of the entire earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore, He named it Babel, for there the Lord confused the language of the entire earth, and from there the Lord scattered them upon the face of the entire earth.

Prophetic, huh? Though the name Babylon means Gate of God, according to Wickipedia, the intrepid online encyclopedia, Babel – its Hebrew version – sounds similar to a word for "confusion."

Yup, the Tower of Babble, indeed. Babble on!