Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [105]
SPOKESMAN: But, Mr Ford, I wanted to talk…
HENRY FORD: {suddenly rigid, extremely alert furious) Why do you imagine birds are just something graceful to enjoy for their feathers and warblings? Birds are necessary for stricdy economic reasons! They destroy damaging insects! Did you know that the only time I mobilized the Ford organization to solicit intervention from the United States government was for the protection of migratory birds. An excellent law had been drawn up for establishing reserves, but it risked getting bogged down in Congress where they could never find the time to pass it. Of course: birds don't vote! So I asked every one of Ford's six thousand agents, spread all over the USA, to send a telegram to their representatives in Congress. That was when Washington began to take the problem seriously… The law was approved. You must understand that I never wanted to use the Ford Motor Company for political ends: each of us has a right to his own opinions and the company mustn't interfere with them. On that occasion the end justified the means, I think, and it was the only exception.
SPOKESMAN: But Mr Ford, enlighten me please: you are the man who changed the image of our planet through industrial organization, motorization … What have little birdies got to do with that?
HENRY FORD: What? You're another one who thinks that the big factories have wiped out trees, flowers, birds, greenery? Quite the contrary! It's only when we learn how to exploit cars and industry as effectively as possible that we will have the time to enjoy nature! My position is very simple: the more time and energy we waste, the less is left to enjoy life. I don't consider the cars that bear my name as mere cars: I hope they will serve to demonstrate the effectiveness of my philosophy…
SPOKESMAN: You mean that you invented and manufactured and sold automobiles so that people could get away from the factories of Detroit and go and hear the birds singing in the woods?
HENRY FORD: One of the people I most admired was a man who dedicated his life to watching and describing birds, John Burroughs. He was a sworn enemy of the automobile and all technical progress! But I managed to make him change his mind… The happiest memories of my life go back to the weeks spent together on a vacation I organized with Burroughs himself, and my other mentors and closest friends, the great Edison, and Firestone, the tyre man … We travelled in a caravan of cars, across the Adirondack Mountains, and the Alleghenys, sleeping under canvas, gazing at the sunsets, the dawns over waterfalls …
SPOKESMAN: But don't you think that an image like this … in relation to what people know about you… Fordism … is, how can I put it?, misleading… doesn't it shirk everything essential?
HENRY FORD: No, no, this is what is essential. American history is a history of journeys between boundless horizons, a history of means of transportation: the horse, the wagons of the pioneers, the railroads … But only the automobile has given Americans America. Only with the automobile have they become masters of the length and breadth of the country, each individual master of his own means of transport, master of his time, in the midst of this immensity of space …
SPOKESMAN: I must confess that the idea we had for your monument … was a little different … a backdrop of factories … of assembly lines … Henry Ford, the creator of the modern factory, of mass production… The first automobile for the common man: the famous Model T…
HENRY FORD: If it's an epigraph you're after, sculpt out the text of the announcement I used to launch the