I think your suggestion is. Can we do two things at once? Well, we're of the view, that we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

--Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, June 2, 2004 (Armitage announced his resignation on November 16, 2004.)

To do two things at once is to do neither.

--Publilius Syrus, Roman slave, first century B.C.

In the midwestern town where I grew up (a town so small that the phone line on our block was a "party line" well into the 1960s, meaning that we shared it with our neighbors and couldn't use it while one of them was using it, unless we wanted to quietly listen in--with their permission, naturally, and only if we were feeling awfully lonesome--while they chatted with someone else), there were two skinny brothers in their 30s who built a car that could drive into the river and become a fishing boat.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

My pals and I thought the car-boat was a wonder. A thing that did one thing but also did another thing-especially the opposite thing, but at least an unrelated thing--was our idea of a great invention and a bold stride toward the future. Where we got this idea, I'll never know, but it caused us to envision a world to come teeming with crossbred, hyphenated machines. Refrigerator-TV sets. Dishwasher-air conditioners. Table saw-popcorn poppers. Camera-radios.

With that last dumb idea, we were getting close to something, as I've noted every time I've dropped or fumbled my cell phone and snapped a picture of a wall or the middle button of my shirt. Impressive. Ingenious. Yet juvenile. Arbitrary. And why a substandard camera, anyway? Why not an excellent electric razor?

Because (I told myself at the cell-phone store in the winter of 2003, as I handled a feature-laden upgrade that my new contract entitled me to purchase at a deep discount that also included a rebate) there may come a moment on a plane or in a subway station or at a mall when I and the other able-bodied males will be forced to subdue a terrorist, and my color snapshot of his trussed-up body will make the front page of USA Today and appear at the left shoulder of all the superstars of cable news.

While I waited for my date with citizen-journalist destiny, I took a lot of self-portraits in my Toyota and forwarded them to a girlfriend in Colorado, who reciprocated from her Jeep. Neither one of us almost died. For months. But then, one night on a snowy two-lane highway, while I was crossing Wyoming to see my girl's real face, my phone made its chirpy you-have-a-picture noise, and I glanced down in its direction while also, apparently, swerving off the pavement and sailing over a steep embankment toward a barbed-wire fence.

It was