I Don’t Know 5: I CAN SPEAK!TM
This George Saunders story takes the form of a letter written by an employee of the company KidLuv to a customer who has returned a product known as the “I CAN SPEAK!TM”, a device which is strapped onto a baby’s face and makes the baby appear that it is talking. The product cannot read the baby’s mind: it simply says a number of stock phrases, or those programmed by the parents, depending on the chosen product’s sophistication.
The letter is filled with creep from the first paragraph: ”I thought I would take some of my personal time (I am on lunch) and try to address the questions you raised in your letter, which is here in front of me on my (cluttered!) desk”, that only gets creepier “We would like to come to your house on Lester Street and make a personalized plaster cast of [your baby’s] real, actual face!”
The KidLuv employee writing the letter goes on to proselytise for the company, detailing the many merits of the I CAN SPEAK!TM range of products, creeping even further as he talks about the use of the device on his own son: “It makes you love him more. Because suddenly he is articulate…we have several times seen a sort of softening in the eyes of our resolute childless friends, as if they, too, would suddenly like to have a baby.” What is wrong with this guy, this corporate fetishising drone loser? It soon becomes apparent: “last weekend my supervisor, Mr Ted Arnes, stopped by (a super guy, he has really given me support, please let him know if you’ve found this letter at all helpful) and boy did we all crack up laughing when [my son] began rubbing his face very rapidly across the carpet in order to make his ICS2100 shout, “FRICTION IS A COMMON AND USEFUL SOURCE OF HEAT!””
“On a personal note, I did not have the greatest of pasts when I came here, having been in a few scrapes and even rehab situations, but now, wow, the commissions roll in, and I have made a nice life for me and [my family]… if you decline my upgrade offer and persist in your desire to return your ICA1900, my commission must be refunded, by me, to Mr Arnes… I don’t quite know what I’m doing wrong.”
It would be fantastically easy to indict the person writing the letter and leave it at that: if he was a good guy, would he work for this creepy corporation? Saunders has the intelligence and empathy to demonstrate that “Corporate America” is a thing once created by humans that now apparently roams around on its own. This is demonstrated in further stories in the collection In Persuasion Nation, in which this story appears, most memorably for me in the title story where a breast filled with Red Bull invades a house and tries to nurse a baby.
Saunders has an essay collection called The Braindead Megaphone, his name for the omnipotent voice of the media, defined as “the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don’t know via high-tech sources”: it exists as a technically alive separate entity, which is harmful, but has no easily definable consciousness at its helm. Similarly, Corporate America pushes people apart and leaves them dumbfounded as to how exactly it got to this or what to do about it. Behind the corporate mask are a whole bunch of people trying to keep their kids fed: the mask itself is alive and out of control. Quoting from The Braindead Megaphone: “How does such a harmful product emanate from such talented people? I’d imagine it has to do with the will to survive… each deferring his or her “real” work until such time as he or she accumulates his or her nut and can head for the hiills, or get a job that lets them honor their hearts.” Doesn’t that seem to reflect Chekhov’s observations in “Gooseberries”? “A young friend who writes content for the news page of an online media giant, emails me:… If anyone wonders why Americans aren’t informed with real news it’s because of sell-out corporate goons like me who will do anything to never deliver a pizza again.”
Saunders doesn’t claim to know what to do about the situation, and from his non-fiction work, it’s clear he knows that awareness of issues doesn’t automatically lead to the resolution of them: he merely aims to reflect those issues, as apparently dumbfounded as anyone else as to how America arrived where it is today.
I don’t know about you, but I feel positively healed, understood, reassured and yet disturbed by these examples. I have re-entered life’s unknowable flux with just enough human understanding and black humour to get me through. I wonder if with enough time, patience and mind-boggling, you will be the next to join these greats?
