This fall's contest between Sen. Barak Obama, Dragonslayer, and Sen. John McCain, Weasel, is unfolding along generational lines, not ideological ones. Sen. Obama appeals to disaffected Republican conservatives for many principled reasons, while Sen. McCain may draw disgruntled liberal Democrats in other ways. It is not Race, Class, or Income which separate them. Their different cultural paradigms stem from widely separated points of origin in Time, not Ethnicity.
Between the 1930s and the 1960s, everything changed; our world evolved in very dramatic ways, from Black & White into Color. The formative environment of people born to those decades was profoundly different. One is sadly obsolete, while the other leads to a cultural sensitivity, 'situational awareness' and contemporary worldview conducive to coping with 21st Century realities...
1936: A World of Black & White - The Weasel was born in 1936, the same year that Life Magazine commenced publication, and in which the first television network began to broadcast; the year that the Hoover Dam was completed, and the RMS Queen Mary and Zeppelin Hindenburg each embarked on their maiden voyages, and in which the Triborough Bridge (NYC) and the Oakland Bay Bridge (SF) were first opened to traffic.
In his childhood, the Weasel's primary forms of entertainment would have been Radio (dominated by orchestral, big band, swing, old timey, and gospel music, and spoken word serial dramas), Comic Books, home Piano Playing, and the anecdotes told by family elders, then born in the 1800s. The predominate Radio culture, featuring "Al Jolson" and "Amos & Andy" was neither cerebral nor interactive. In 1936, Margaret Mitchell had just published her novel "Gone With the Wind", yet to become a major motion picture, while the film version of H.G. Well's "Shape of Things to Come" anticipated a world of devastating [and nearly perpetual] war. The Christian propaganda film "Reefer Madness" also debuted in theaters, a touchstone of the thinking of that era. The 1936 Berlin Olympics, in which African American track and field star Jesse Owens would capture four gold medals, became the first widely televised event in human history.
In 1936, industry as we know it was just emerging from its infancy since the turn from the 19th Century, while vacuum tubes had become the new 'big thing' in electronics, and 'plastics' were still a high tech miracle, yet to come into their own as manufactured products.
A 1936 Civil War would put in power Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who would remain dictator of Spain for the next 39 years, until his death in 1975. In the 1930s era of colonial domination, such dictatorships and monarchies were pervasive throughout the world, often with the active collusion of religious authorities.
It was often U.S. policy to overlook their repression, and even their genocide, so that multinational trading relationships would not be disrupted. This extention of 19th Century mercantilism continues into the present, with the WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, and the NAU/SPP created by Bush/McCain and other multinational politicians to legitimize practices which most Americans would find objectionable if they only knew. True to its origin in another era, another time period, this philosophy of covert governance contends such matters to be beyond the capacity of average citizens to understand or process, and relegates such matters to diplomats, bureaucrats, and Congressional subcommittees meeting behind closed doors, deliberating beyond public scrutiny. Thats how they did things back in those days...
Over the next three decades, wars, aviation, modern manufacturing, television, and the spread of pop culture would transform the U.S. both economically and socially, in ways almost inconceivable in 1936. We would discard livery stables, typewriters, slide rules, drafting tables, ice boxes, secretarial pools, hand crank/party line telephones, player pianos, phonographs, Super 8mm home movies, iron lungs, chalkboards, overhead transparencies, ditto/mimeograph machines, carbon paper, and kerosene lamps as obsolete, in favor of modern alternatives from the contemporary generation.
In an accelerating world where technological change becomes exponentially more rapid, the linear thought patterns of the past are no longer agile enough to cope with the present moment. An American President must not be reliant upon Teleprompters or Talking Points or Sound Bytes, or a Manufactured Message of the Day. This is no longer the world of Roosevelt, Truman, or Eisenhower, and it never will be again. Our leaders must grok what is happening around them, be proactive with it, and be able to articulate that understanding to an often confused and frightened public.
1961: A World of Color - The Dragonslayer came along 25 years later in 1961, the year that Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and Yuri Gagarin launched into Space. The Venera spacecraft explored Venus that year, while the first telecommunications satellite, Telstar, was constructed by Bell Laboratories. A year of many nuclear tests and X-15 rocketplane flights, 1961 also saw the first digital photography and completion of the first commercial scale seawater desalination plant.
Both the Beatles and Bob Dylan began to play and record in 1961, bringing "Rock & Roll" from its niche market to the cultural landslide it became by mid-decade. Television was now ubiquitous in every home, featuring "Dick Van Dyke", "Gunsmoke", "The Avengers", "Andy Griffith", "My Three Sons", ABC's "Wide World of Sports" and Disney's "Wonderful World of Color". Of course, this remained neither cerebral, nor interactive, however, the new visual medium did lead directly to the technological advancement and cultural assimilation which brought us to the world we presently inhabit.
President Eisenhower warned Americans of the growing power of the Military-Industrial Complex, while just months later President Kennedy warned Americans to construct backyard fallout shelters. The Zen of the Space Age was shaped by looming peril; the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis followed that April's Bay of Pigs invasion, the following year. In 1961, the U.S. Air Force commissioned the first computer assembled entirely from Integrated Circuits, as Fairchild commercialized semiconductor technology; meanwhile, the first industrial robots are introduced, in factories manufacturing televisions and automobiles.
Despite Cold War dangers, peace prevailed, and 1961 also saw the founding of Amnesty International, The Peace Corps, the U.S. Agency for International Development; the completion of the Marshall Plan, and the start of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, a 10 year program to reach out to Latin America.
Our Dragonslayer came of age as the message of the beat poets evolved into an entire counterculture movement, questioning the broad panalply of obsolete social strictures which descended from the 19th Century. Philosophers of the period, including Dylan - who remains relevant today - recognized a falling away, a decaying of the old order. No one could predict the world which has emerged, only that the confines of the past would be inadequate to what was birthing among them. The struggle of that challenge continues to this day, in the 21st Century. On May 25, 1961, when President Kennedy commited the United States to landing Man on the Moon within the decade, he foresaw the technological spinoffs and social implications of his decision, but he could not have known the synergy between the two, and the many ways in which the technologies themselves would affect our lives, and each other.
In the 1960s information technology began to feed back in upon itself. Moore's Law was formulated in 1961, and has proven itself valid ever since. Better computers and connections between them enable more effective technical communication, which, in turn, permits engineers to design and construct still better and faster imformation appliances and infrastructure. This process becomes more powerful with each iteration, to where the potency of each "doubling" is of an almost unimaginable magnitude, and computers design future computers, which their human architects decreasingly comprehend.
Any realistic evaluation attempting to qualify the next President of the United States must take these tidal forces into account, concerning the two applicants for that position. Our future in the 21st Century is unmoored from the world of the 19th, in almost every respect. We have transcended many obsolete cultural memes, attitudes, tabboos, and stereotpes of one another.
As usual, our government lags the society at large in coming to terms with such transformation. Entrenched special interests, in control of the Establishment for the past Century have just lost the edge of power in one political party, and are now scrambling to retain control through their remaining surrogate, a Republican, the Weasel, John McCain. However, in this hyperlinked Web 2.0 world of 2008, political power is virtual - and we're both looking at it right now on this screen - each in our own respective "nows".
This election has been characterized by the MSM as a choice between some peculiar 'value sets', the iconic politicians representing each - and the clashes between them - specific to "Women" vs. "African Americans", "Rich vs. Poor", "Urban vs. Rural", "Christians" vs. "Mormons", "Warriors" vs. "Bankers", "Labor" vs. "Hispanics", and other such rubbish. We've allowed the power elite to divide us into categories and set us against one another. Meanwhile, the far more serious question, as to which candidate is best qualified by upbringing, life experience, and temprament, has gone unasked, along with the other important issues of the day.
We need, and can have, a leader able to grasp both the nuances and intricacies of this critical social, political, and economic metamorphosis, this period of transcendence. Look out, into that future. There, be Dragons. Without such a leader, chaos will certainly ensue. Fortunately, one is available, in our Dragonslayer, Barack Obama, if we can rise to the occasion and elect him President of the United States. Can we? YES WE CAN!