Save the phone booth!

Phone booths are an icon of American livelihood. Remember the joy of depositing a coin and hearing the "ching-ching" of the bells? Holding the sticky receiver, you could smell the lunch of whomever used the phone before you on the mouthpiece. Oh the joys of finding spare change in the return slot and jiggling the handle after your call to see if Ma Bell would refund any spare cents.

Available on street corners, hotel lobbies and every sort of waiting room, phone booths and their folding glass doors are part of Americana. Think places "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure". Remember Michael Corleone and the foreshadowed image of shutting Kay out of the phone booth to call home. And of course, we remember the nerdy Clark Kent who preferred phone booths as his locale for the life saving costume change. Surely Lois would have fallen to her death if there were not a phone booth right outside the Daily Planet.

In recent years, with the advent of cell phones, phone booths are becoming less and less visible.
Despite any market factors or cost/benefit analysis, I call on the Justice Department to save phone booths. Surely, somehow in the bailout or with a study of anti-trust laws, the DOJ can find reasons by which Verizon and other phone providers are obligated to keep phone booths open to the public.

House Speaker Pelosi makes a similar argument in her open letter to the DOJ about saving the newspaper industry.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/16/MNIA16GCBO.DTL

I'm sure that Mrs. Pelosi is deeply concerned about the many constituents who may lose their jobs should the San Fran Chronicle go under. But really, we know that she is dependent on the left-leaning paper's support of her liberal policies and the left-leaning AP and Reuters favorable stories. Saving them is like a lousy basketball team who plays in an empty gym lobbying to save the cheerleaders.

Newspapers are businesses and the success of the business is contingent on the quality of the product. When the value of the product is deemed weak by the public, they discontinue their purchases. Or, when the business is poorly run and managed making the product too expensive, the public discontinues their purchases. Either way, businesses sometimes fail. And we have to let them.

These past 2 months of Obama-mania has lead to a strange belief that government is the guarantor and insurer of American businesses. AIG, banks, cars all deemed by government "too important" and "too big" to let fail. Add newspapers to this list of rescues.

And phone booths. And typewriters. And 8 trak players. And the TV show "Arrested Development". That one was worthy of a bailout.