Machines

I’ll grant you a modern laptop hooked up to an HP printer is a more efficient and cer- tainly a cleaner means to re- produce yr message than the whirling drum of rebellious black ink we depended upon back in nineteen fifty-seven. But when my spellcheck wants to change brideshead to birdseed, I wonder whether that satirist of misuse whose black warriors ate their British boots and used a tank to melt down belligerent recruits would laugh or cringe waiting for the machine to send out once a year condolences that the man who’d mocked stupidity had traded life in a mansion for a sack of sunflower seeds?