By David Glenn Cox
I dunno, somehow it didn’t feel much like Christmas this year. A lot of fear and apprehension in the air. A fear of the known as well as the unknown. But the older you get the more the holiday becomes a reminder of all that time has taken from us. Making more a whiskey holiday than an eggnog holiday. The ghost of Christmas past shows up at your door and won’t leave until new year’s.
We blame Christmas when the villain is actually time. Christmas is only the sign post and time the Sunday punch. But without time we would not move at all. Without time, you would never need to move. Provided you weren’t hungry now, you never would be. And if you are hungry, bad news. All that exists is right now. Try building a pyramid or planting a crop in a world like that. You couldn’t do it because there is only right now. All planning involves time.
Time is a cruel mistress who doesn’t play fair with conditions or the terms of your employment. You get what you get. Smile, it’s not the plague. It’s just a dark age. To some are born the glories or Rome others the glories of South Alabama. Many people think a dark age is when everything just stops and shuts down completely. Then we all flog ourselves in a monastery and sing Gregorian chants to each other before the afternoon gruel.
The term “dark age” isn’t modern. The people of what we call the dark ages, named it that themselves. They saw Roman bridges and roads and aqueducts. And they marveled and said to themselves and their neighbors. We could not duplicate these amazing things we see. How advanced they were, we must be living in a dark age.
From Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility took 63 years. The United States left the moon in 1972, over fifty years ago. Lots of big talk under the bridge since then, but zero manned landings. “I’m gonna get a ship and sail off like Columbus did!” Gee, why can’t we do what we did fifty years ago? It’s not a secret. It is rocket science, but they wrote it all down for us. And yet…
An American audience was first introduced to the Beatles in 1964. The Beatles broke up in 1969 and since then, nobody. For one brief shining moment, the Beatles were at the same time the most Avant garde musical group and also the most mainstream group. Pop groups come and go. Manufactured like a TV sets, just another product for sale in a world full of products for sale. Designed for this year’s crop of little girls like new Buicks for dad. Music nobody remembers, or cars nobodies remembers in five years.
Outside of computer control and pollution junk there has been no major improvement to the internal combustion engine in well over fifty years. Only costly add ons trying to make it run cleaner and better which only makes them more complicated and more expensive. Why, I bet, at two million dollars a copy. I could build you one hell of a car that was both clean, economical and still keep my 427 Cobra Jet. The same thing happened to Steam power when Diesel came along. Steam became more and more costly as Diesel got cheaper. Battery costs are falling like computer prices did in the 1990’s.
Take a photo of these three famous Americans into any bar on any continent on the planet. And people will invariably smile and instantly know who Moe, Larry and Curley are. Dead well over fifty years and without any advertising budget they endure, passed down from generation to generation. I saw a Stooges video that had over a million hits on YouTube in eleven months.
What program on the air now will people still be watching in 2095? Besides the Stooges. They tried to do a remake of the Stooges with three “modern” actors portraying the Stooges and now three southern states want to use it in the death penalty. They’ll fill you full of drugs make watch this movie until you die. I say, Cruel and unusual! But you can’t catch lightening in a bottle, and I can’t just decide to write Shakespearian sonnet.
But in this wondrous age we live in. We have a machine that will write the sonnet for you! “Will it be beautiful like Shakespeare and genuine?” No! Of course not. It’s artificial! Look here, we can take a picture of your cat and make it look like Vincent Van Gogh painted it. Now what do you think of that, huh? Amazing stuff, huh? An age of miracles! Great art as bullshit! Why great art made so simple any moron can do it!
Why with this machine we can imitate any great artist, Leonardo? You bet, ha, ha. Do you want your cat DaVinhcied? It can do anything, except, create of course only imitate, it’s a copy machine. Mark Twain was asked who was the greatest inventor of all time? He answered, “accident.” We poor humans learn from our mistakes; exactly the things which machines don’t do very well. A machine never would have thought to leave a petri dish exposed over a long weekend to the spores from the lab upstairs inadvertently discovering penicillin.
Columbus was looking for India, not North America. The machine would have told him to turn around. You have failed again! “Sorry, my mistake.” What do you expect? He lived in a dark age. The educational system was poor and splintered. The Greeks surpassed us in architecture and mathematics thousands of years ago and just to show us up, built it all with hand tools and cyphered without scratch paper. (show offs!) The Pharaoh could tell you the approximate circumference of the Earth. Ask our King that question today and see what kind of convoluted nonsense answer you’ll likely get. It’s a New Dark Age!
“Well, that California get-rich disease of my youth spread like wildfire. It produced a civilization which has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life, its poetry, its soft romantic visions. And replaced them with a money fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep which does not refresh. It has created a thousand useless luxuries and turned them into necessities and satisfied nothing. It has dethroned God and set up a shekel in his place. Oh, the dreams of our youth – how beautiful they are, and how perishable.” – Mark Twain
