When I created this blog three years ago, the name
“Futureworld” came to me right away. I had a dim realization that the title
wouldn’t be as meaningful to others as it was to me, but that didn’t matter
very much: it was my brand-new beautiful little baby blog, and I was determined
to call it whatever I pleased.
But my thoughts ran something like this:
I was born
in July 1957, just a few months before the official beginning of the Space Age.
My childhood was full of astronauts and science fiction. Soon, we thought, we’d
be living in an unimaginably advanced world; no one would suffer or be hungry, and
everyone would have a flying car, and everything would be utterly futuristic
and wonderful.
Well, you know what? Some of that stuff came true. The
Internet is still a miracle to those of us who remember the primitive 1950s and
1960s. Partner and I comment almost daily on the fact that we can pick up a
mobile device at a moment’s notice and summon up the weather report, or the
news, or the cast of a 1944 movie, or Skype someone on another continent, or do
any number of other bizarrely futuristic things.
So: Partner and I are living in the “future” that we were
promised back in the 1950s and 1950s.
Except that we’re not. People are still stupid and
retrograde. There are still politicians who want to restrict voting rights and
immigration. Just like the 1920s and 1930s! The world is still at war. Just as
in 500 BCE!
That’s what I meant by “Futureworld.” Here we are, in 2013,
and we should be living on space stations and speaking Esperanto, but in many
ways we’re still primitives, attacking and killing one another over trifles.
Ah me. The farther we go into the future, the more firmly we
remain stuck in the past.
In Tony
Kushner’s play “Angels in America,” there’s a scene in which two ghosts – a
medieval one and a 17th-century one – appear in the 1980s to speak
to their descendant, a gay Manhattanite with AIDS. The medieval ancestor
doesn’t like the 1980s, and leaves as quickly as he can. The other sighs and
looks around himself. “The Twentieth Century,” he says sadly. "Oh dear, the world has gotten so terribly terribly old."
Brother, was he right.
No comments:
Post a Comment