Provide me with my own $#@!% Jetpack Kos!
Wed Jul 02, 2008 at 08:12:47 AM PDT
It is 2008
...where the filk is my atomic powered personal jet pack?
...my personal roof landing ornithopter?
...my amphibious Cadillac?
...my sub-orbital super sonic shuttle so I can race sunrise for a real night out?
...my Great Wheel in the Sky turning to the strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra ?
...my Turing Tested AI personal assistant?
...my County Fair Real Rocket Rides for a sawbuck?
...my Replicant Android double?
... my household robot/coffeemaker?
... my hand held phase disruptor?
My point (and I might just have one somewhere) after the flip...
It must have been spring of '69. On the cusp of the '70's.
Long before many of you were born and - even more disconcerting to me - before some of your parents were born. We were young then, and hopeful... Despite the fact that we'd just seen the crap parade of '68 and all that entailed, we still looked to a bright and shiny future. We had been trained to do that. The future, after all, belonged to us.
At my grade school one fine 1969 day we were ushered into a class with a clacking school board issue 16 mm projector (complete with shaky speakers that made the narrator sound like he was an asthmatic being dragged along a corduroy road). The teacher proceeded to show us the future.
It was a PR flick for one of the Detroit auto giants, Ford probably, It purported to show us kids just what we could expect around our fortieth birthdays, the impending "turn of the century", which seemed so far in the future.
From what I can remember the film showed us a future where all the cars would be honking big boats (Fords, natch) that looked like a cross between Presidential limousines and Italian ocean liners: Miles of chrome and gleaming glass and whitewall tires all the way up.
There were adult men who looked like they got their daily dress orders from IBM (crisp white shirt and correct tie), and adult women who looked like they were dressed according to the taste of Gene Roddenberry/Phyllis Schlafly. I can't remember seeing any kids. Maybe the future wouldn't have them. (?)
The only bit of the flick I can recall with especial clarity, that wasn't strictly car related, was something to do with a "cocktail party" (how sixties). This was held in a home "entertainment centre".
They had a TV screen that must have been three feet across! In colour! (Since this was an American film, all the colour was in color, of course).
The scheduled entertainment for the evening was a live concert from Havana. Cuba. That's how the narrator phrased it: "Havana. Cuba.", every time he mentioned it....and he mentioned it a lot.
From the look of the concert "Havana. Cuba." of 2000 had a lot in common with "Havana. Cuba." of 1959. I was expecting at any moment to hear "Babbaloo".
Subtext and perspective and assumptions cloud all our hopes and plans and predictions, of course. Whether a corporate bit of consumerist, sexist, and anti-Castro flavoured wish fulfillment and trash like that one, or the Science Fiction I was just then getting into, or the social commentary and political philosophy I was to read voraciously in the '70's.
Still, it gives one pause to think of how far we have fallen short of our youthful moments of anticipatory wonder.
How did the future that was become the present we're settling for? We dreamed in poetry and they gave us product.
Follow the links to get the full flavor of where I'm going...
Where once we dreamed of
prophetic Singers, who would arise from the crowds and call all of us to social action and organization by the wonder and moral force of their songs...
...now we get ...this.
Where once we read allegorical novels about the possibilities of societies built on totally alien sexual imperatives, and wondered at the possibilities... wondered at the possibility of being alien and yet accepted in a rainbow of possibles...
...now we get this.
Where once we delighted in stories of the moral and logical quandaries brought about by applying rigid yet contradictory laws to robotic labour (Asimov)
...now we get Lou Dobb's nightly crusade for applying rigid yet contradictory laws to Mexican labour.
We dreamed of Captain Kirk...
...not this jerk.
Aquarius, as hackneyed as it sounded even back then, was my personal anthem of joy and wonder...
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation
Aquarius!
Aquarius!
...that is, until 1985, when Ford (yes that car company) caught up with me again.
Watch.
Think I'll drive my Aerostar to Havana. Cuba.
But be of good heart. Wonder never dies. We may get product when we ask for poetry, but poetry is still free, and sometimes it surprises.
I mean - who would have predicted in 1969, after Chicago and Richard Daley and Dixiecrats and Nixon's Southern Strategy and Bobby dead and Martin dead...
...that the Democratic Party would ever nominate an African American for President?
