Note for a time capsule

By EDWARD WELLEN
Illustrated by RICHARD KLUGA
Yes, I know, the rating services probably never call you up. But they call me up twenty times a week!
I take it you sociologists living in what to me is the future (I take it there's a future, a future with a place for sociologists) will note the unlikely revolution in taste now going on. For your information, then, here's why the rating services are reflecting a sudden upping from the pelvis to the cortex—just in case this will have become a cause for wild surmise.
You probably know what the rating services are ( were, to you; but I don't want to tense this document up). Most people nowadays don't know about the rating services; they know of them.
Every so often I hear someone say darkly, I don't know about those polls. I've never had a call from them and no one I know has ever had a call from them.
I keep quiet or mumble something noncommittal. I could say, truthfully, I do know about those polls. They ring me up more than twenty times a week. I could say that but I don't.
Not so much because I don't want to seem a crackpot or a liar as because I don't want to spoil a good thing. Or at least what I think is a good thing—and for the time being what I think is a good thing is what the world thinks is a good thing.
Now, in order for you to get the picture you must understand that the New York metropolitan area fashions the literary and musical fads of the United States and the United States by example and by infiltration via writings and movies and recordings fashions the fads of the world. And the New York metropolitan area goes by the opinions I frame.
It probably seems strange to you that I, in any amassing of statistics merely one digit in the neighborhood of the decimal point, can claim to exert such far-reaching influence.
But I've seen much the same sort of thing in my work as a CPA. Someone possessing relatively few shares in a holding company may exercise an inordinate amount of power over the national economy.