Steve Jobs gave us President Trump
By David Von Drehle Columnist September 5 at 7:24 PM
As Congress returns from summer recess to a plate heaped with work — President Trump added a gooey serving of immigration reform Tuesday on top of the debt ceiling, the budget, hurricane relief and tax reform — another of America’s key institutions is marking 10 years that shook the world.
These simultaneous events have caused the strangest picture to form in my mind. I see Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate majority leader, as the tonsured abbot of a Benedictine monastery in the middle of the 15th century. The abbot’s job is to oversee production of handwritten Bibles by monks in the abbey scriptorium. He and his predecessors have tended this vitally important labor for hundreds of years.
But now a goldsmith named Gutenberg, in a German town called Mainz, has devised a machine that can produce identical Bibles — or any other document, for that matter — quickly and cheaply using movable metal letters and oil-based ink. And the abbot is awakening to the realization that nothing will ever be same.
When Apple unveiled its first smartphone in 2007, the company sparked a communications revolution likely to be as transformative as Gutenberg’s. It’s the nature of such seismic change to shake the institutions of culture and society to the ground.
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