Manual Labors
Atlantic, The, July, 2003 by Cullen Murphy
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A number of years ago Mort Walker, the cartoonist, gave me a pencil sketch of one of his Beetle Bailey comic strips. It shows the character Plato, the strip's intellectual, talking to Zero, the strip's dolt. They are putting some of Plato's books on a shelf, and Zero asks if Plato has read them all.
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Yes, mostly, Plato says. What's in them?, Zero wonders. Plato replies, "All the knowledge of the past on which we can base our actions in the future." And Zero asks, "What if some of the pages get stuck together?" It's a good question, and a chilling one for a person like me, who believes deeply in the power of handbooks—who has faith, in other words, that any subject can be distilled into compact and accessible form. Lose a few pages from the manual Crime Scene Investigation and you may never know how to make a ...
