Wednesday, August 29, 2007

The Future, as seen in 1975, 1992 and today

I don't write poetry anymore, but I used to, back in the early 1990s when reading poetry out loud in coffeehouses seemed like just a newly revived fad — a bizarre neo-beatnik thing to do. Because it is my nature to poke malicious fun at nearly any solemn enterprise, I immediately expanded my stand-up repertoire to include writing and reciting bad poetry in a mock-Maynard G. Krebs style.

Today a friend reminded me of one of my first pseudo-Beat poems, written circa 1992, which I reproduce here in its entirety:
Gerald Ford haunts my memories
Casting a spiteful trout out of my past
On to the graham cracker crust before me.
My eyes took shape in an earlier age,
Long ago, when telephones walked the earth.
In those days, all things came to a man
Willing to see the world in flames.
Living in a happier time has not suited my disposition.
I yearn for the enlivening dooms of my youth.
It's terrible, but it's actually one of the better poems I've ever written. Ironically, while the poem is about an obsolete picture of the future, it's the viewpoint of the poem that is now entirely obsolete. I wrote the poem in reaction to the view of the future that everybody, including me, believed in the early 1990s — that with the fall of communism and the End of History, life was going to be universally peaceful, pleasant, prosperous and boring.

I compared that to the picture of the future we had in the 1970s — that things were just going to get worse and worse, and we'd face a Soylent Green future of ecological devastation, totalitarian government, natural disasters and wars.

In 1992, that future seemed ridiculously overdramatic, but it had a wistful charm ... imagine, that people used to think the future would be exciting, not boring! In 1992, the near future seemed like it was going to be a melange of Neuromancer and AT&T's "You Will" ads ... an endless suburban shopping mall where stupid yuppies bought stupid corporate products.

Gadgets got better, but there was nothing about the 1990s that seemed whizz-bang enough for a kid raised on Space 1999. I remember being disappointed by the 1990s and the turn of the century because it just wasn't futuristic enough ... the "Where's my flying car?" meme.

But look at the world today ... we have a totalitarian government, we have an endless war, we have a huge ecological disaster ... the 1970s had the future down cold, and the 1990s was living in a dream world.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

two blogs in one month!!

The future is HERE, and Jaguar is it's observer.

twice a month, anyway.

singingnymph said...

I wrote some poetry today.
Some people on Tribe have been writing haiku about the guy who committed suicide at Burning Man.

1.
Two hours of stink
And flies and rigor mortis
Before "He's dead, yo."

2.
Hanged men usually
Get post-mortem erections.
Wonder if he did.

KaMotion said...

yeah man. *snap* *snap*