Letter From America: The Steel Fist
Ronnie Bray sees a fairground machine with a steel fist in the stores of the world's biggest retailer - a machine which brought nothing but disappointment when in boyhood he first encountered it at an English seaside resort.
One of life’s greatest disappointments is to be let down by someone or something you have trusted implicitly. Complete trust is placed only after scrutiny has shown justification for our confidence due to past and present behaviour and, in the case of non-human objects of trust, because of design, appearance of capability, and other visual clues that lead us to believe that it will not let us down. Some symbols inspire trust, while others convey to us the ideas that we can rely on them to perform their function.
For example, the badge of the Royal Armoured Corps is an Armoured fist, raised to show an enemy that if it comes against the corps, it will take a hit square in the face that will deter it from a second onslaught. It is convincing, and it has never failed to be true.
Another steel fist has never failed to disappoint. My first encounter with this symbol of strength came early in life, either on a visit to Blackpool to enjoy the glamour and glitter of its hollow promises, or else at a local fun fair, whose promises were narrower in scope but just as disappointing when it came time to deliver.
What attracts people to the glass box in the first place Is not the mechanism, although the electric hand, often wearing rubber finger tips as if it was going to count money, looks powerful enough to lift up and drop the prized object into the delivery chute to the successful operator. And therein lies the deception.
The hand looks strong, but it has half the grip of a vitiated goldfish, and anything that it manages to close its fingers around, immediately drops from its clutch when it has been raised an inch above its resting-place.
Gold watches, objects d’art, spangled fripperies, and tawdry must-haves for eager but undiscerning children and their older counterparts, lie nestled one atop another in untidy profusion in a brightly lit glass or perspex tank that also houses the contrivance for – in theory – grabbing them, hoisting them from their resting places, jerking them in suitably mechanical fashion over to the corner hopper, and by spreading the fingers apart dropping them into the chute for the lucky winner to retrieve by lifting a large metal flap.
The deception is carried further by the arm, or grab, continuing its pantomime of making delivery even after the prize has fallen back laughing into the pit of unobtainables, as if to have us believe that it does not know that it has failed to hold on to the treasure it grasped but which fell from its grip as easily as if from the hand of an elderly faery on her death bed.
When I grew older and no longer believed that Fairyland on the main road at Blackpool actually was fairyland, I finally figured out that the machines were strictly non-delivery, and that the fun was spending hard-earned holiday cash, and the fish and chips eaten afterwards to assuage the disappointment that the Steel Hand inevitably delivered. Disappointment being all that it delivered!
Now, the world has turned, and in modernity, they now grace the vestibules of Wal-Mart supermarkets in America. Moreover, the grip of the hand is better, and the chance of catching and actually holding onto something to discharge is exponentially increased. So much so, that I have had to stop growling, "If you want to win on that machine, you’ll have to buy it!" in passing.
People actually fish out cherished articles to the delight of their gleeful children, and to the heightened appreciation of the motor skills of parents by children who have not yet managed to fish successfully themselves.
Perhaps I ought not to add what is obvious, which is that the charge for each attempt of these grabber machines is fifty cents, whereas the wholesale cost of the prizes is about half that. Although with the buying power of the world’s largest retailer, it is probably much less.
Perhaps it is not that parents are better at mechanical manipulation than my own parents were, but that these modern ones are made with less of a bias towards the house, and with a view to pleasing children, and parents, who will one day become faithful customers of Sam Walton’s brainchild and other retail outlets who all vie for everyone’s pocket dollars. As a marketing ploy, it is brilliant, but for the children who go away clutching their rewards, it is the return of Fairyland, gingerly delivered by an abnormally co-operative steel hand.
For my own part, even though I see soft toy after soft toy, and garish treasure after garish treasure liberated from a machine that was my nemesis as a lad, I have not managed to prise fifty cents from my own steel fist to become a winner. It is far too late for me to do that. And anyway, I still don’t trust them!
Copyright © 2004 – Ronnie Bray
ALL
