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The Opposable Themb and Other Wonders
North Miami Beach, FL July 8, 2001 Aaron H.
Schectman
THINKING ALLOWED
Essays on issues, ideas and reflections on the times. Published now and
then, Opinions pro or con are welcome.
THE OPPOSABLE THUMB AND OTHER WONDERS
Since I fell when my bike could not negotiate a return to the sidewalk last
Tuesday I have noticed the utility of our opposable thumbs. I can type but
cannot grip small crumbs, pieces of paper and cannot turn knobs. I am
getting better but the puffiness remains along with some discoloration that
traveled up my arm and down to my fingers.
When you think about it we are enormously ingenius machines. We have
binocular vision and are bipedal. My bicycle was imagined by someone
centuries ago and the one I use has all kinds of modifications that make it
comfortable and usable for me despite arthritic knees. But our bodies are
still the wondrous habitations for our unique brains that think up all the
miracles we enjoy today; for instance, the new and quite satisfactory "Dr.
Doolittle" that we saw yesterday.
I noticed that actors are getting worried that the puppeteers and computer
wizards will replace them by their keyboard-generated simulacrums. Somebody
used the memory enhanced by the use of computers with almost the same
capacity of the human original to create the wonders that make it seem that
animals can talk. One can easily suspend disbelief when cute raccoons and
bears talk and go on strike.
I must confess that we first saw "AI" and walked right out into another
theatre to see the Dr. Doolittle film. The Spielberg imagination about
creating a little boy out of manufactured parts who had the capacity to love
made a point that the mother to whom he was given could not love him in the
same way she loved her own birthed child. I thought this "movie" lost its
power to make me believe when Spielberg resorted to an image from an earlier
work and inserted it to help us suspend disbelief. My belief in the wonder
of my opposable thumb is more firmly anchored than in that ending. I wish
the creators of such miraculous stories could think me up a couple of new
knee joints that could work without the needles and cutting presently
employed. There is a real limitation on those of us who were born before
radio to accept what children believe in automatically since they grow up
with this always-changing world. Carol's Evaluation:10 out of 10.
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