To Watch It All a Second Time, Press 9
When Wall Street cheers, hang on to your wallet. The denizens of the financial community are currently in love with the sixty-three-thousand-million dollar deal that reunites AT&T with Bell South to cobble together a monopoly the feds broke up in 1984.
1984? George Orwell’s 1984? You mean ‘big brother’ will be watching us again? Yeah, well . . .
My take on it is that the telephone companies became obsolete in this increasingly digital world because they basically no longer had anything to sell that we wanted. Who needed a hard-wired telephone when you could slip one in your pocket and make phone calls on the way to the supermarket? Even grandma glommed on to the technology, thrilled that she could hear from her daughter in Europe, while weeding the string-beans. Or maybe not so thrilled, you never know about mother-daughter relationships, but you get my drift.
As the sands shifted out from under them, knowing no better, the steel-rimmed-spectacle folks that ran the phone companies did wh…