Considering the mutual interdependence

of language and culture

and recalling the film

'Primitive Man in a Modern World"

while sitting on the toilet

browsing a catalog

of power and hand tools

 

 

Dedicated to The Moody Institute of Science

 

 

 

Robert Witham, Jr. - revised 14 November 1979

For Judy Tizon

 

 

 

 

A recently published report, culminating a four and one half year, one million three hundred and fifty thousand dollar study conducted by a large and renowned mid-western university stated (and I quote):

 

The problem is not one of scientific know-how or even economic or environmental feasibility. The problem is the hammer itself. Its very constitution negates its use as an artificial sweetener. We must, therefore, conclude that funding of the Hammer as Sugar Substitute project be terminated. It is our suggestion that moneys currently assigned to research and development be either returned to the general fund or be re-allocated to a project which has shown definite signs of progress-e.g. professor R.I.P. Off's work on the practicality of recycling disposable diapers as a low cost building material.

 

The report was expected to be controversial, but ramifications have far exceeded all expectations. Dr. C. Klit, the Sorbonne's famed Peruvian gynecologist, sensed in the report the necessary demise of the long universally held Aristotelian view of the hammer. In the Aristotelian conceptualization, as you no doubt recall, the hammer was seen as static, a passive tool of man, which became dynamic only with his utilization of it. In such a view, man was seen as capable of doing anything he wishes at any time he wishes.

The honorable Klit states that the report shows the hammer to be, at once and always, dynamic; that man is not free to utilize it as was previously believed. He is however, careful in the fashioning of his argument. He does not, for example, deny the widely accepted and well-documented effectiveness of the hammer at driving nails or at bringing excruciating pain to the left thumb. But rather than attributing these achievements solely to man's relative ability or lack of it, he suggests that both are possible because the hammer is so well suited to such endeavors. By pointing out several other activities to which the hammer is not so well suited, he argues that the hammer must be recognized as a major determiner of its possible usage. As he states, "it is equally accepted that the hammer makes for a lousy flower pot and brews a very poor cup of coffee."

By never minimizing individual and cultural preferences, Klit has allowed himself to receive support from wide ranging sources. Perhaps most supportive of Klit has been the highly respected anthropologist Ms. Emily Three Peckerfoot and her often discuss "water fetch experiment." In that famous experiment Ms. Peckerfoot asked people to fetch water from a deep well. On the ground near the well, she purposefully placed a bucket with a long rope attached, a jigsaw puzzle, and banana peel, a dead chicken, and a wooden-handled hammer. In ninety-nine point thirty four percent of the cases, the rope and bucket were chosen for the assigned task of fetching water. Because the experiment was conducted around the world in more that eighty-four different cultures, she concluded that all religion sprang from a primal fear of rising taxes. But after reading Klit's article in the March '79 issue of Popular Crime, she became convinced that the results of her experiment offered more than incidental support of Klit's hypothesis. Not one of her subjects chose the hammer as a water gatherer. And while she had correctly seen this as reflecting humanity's utter disdain of brain damaged ducks; she now concluded that one must acknowledge that, to some degree, the rejection of the hammer as water container must be attributed to its relative ineffectiveness at performing the assigned task.

The Klit/Peckerfoot hypothesis, as it has come to be known, has swept the intellectual world. That it stresses the controlling aspect of form on content or that the medium is the message is obvious and might help account for the impassioned acclamation and condemnation it has received. The Archbishop of Boysenberry, Sir Penal Code, in the current issue of The Church of God suggests that it represents a return to the blasphemous "You cannot roller-skate in a buffalo herd" philosophy which marked the beginning of the seventeenth and a half century. Spurred on by such high praise, Klit and Peckerfoot have collaborated on a new, soon to be released, book which tells all: It is, at Best, Extremely Difficult to Saw a Two by Four With a Hammer.