In the July, 1963 issue of Playboy magazine, one of the most memorable convocations (The Playboy Panel : 1964 & Beyond) of science fiction writers offered their forecasts for the future. They included such names as: Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Frederick Pohl, Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt and James Blish. The topic for that assembly was the future (1964 and beyond) and what it holds for Americans and the world. Some of the projections were nothing short of gob smacking, including Robert Heinlein's forecast that future space missions could be run "on cheap fuels like kerosene." The insets below afford some short takes:
Among the most eye -popping wrong predictions were Heinlein's on kerosene for space craft, Arthur Clarke's that "U.S. Capitalism can't last any longer than USSR state socialism". and Asimov's that "some day unnatural sex practices would become legal, ethical and even patriotic."
Among the correct opinions was A.E. Van Vogt's that "breeding for quality is a fallacy" - skewering nonsense like that generated by writer Charles Murray in his 'Coming Apart' - which I also shot down in an earlier blog post, i.e.
But I found James Blish's ruminations on freedom in the future most cogent, especially when he pointed out that as more energy is expended in a society, more freedom tends to be lost.
He told the Playboy panel specifically:
"We are getting ourselves more and more involved in projects which demand high expenditures of energy and money. and I think it's an irreversible process at this juncture. The more intricately involved those crucial decisions become - in Russia or America - the less amenable they are to evaluation and judgment by a majority vote of laymen, no matter how well educated and well-intentioned those laymen are.
In the United States, especially on the far Right, there is denial the danger exists at all. One can only hope that we undergo some sort of reappraisal - perhaps catalyzed by a demagogue like Senator McCarthy - which forces us to acknowledge the condition - while we can still process the freedom of choice to do something about it."
How prescient was Blish, citing the likes of Eugene McCarthy at the time, nearly 60 years ago? Which begs the question: What would he think of the even more malignant demagogue Donald Trump? A divisive and despicable character followed and embraced by up to a third of those "laymen voters" mentioned by Blish. And whose threat to U.S. democracy is even pooh-poohed by The Wall Street Journal editorialists, as it was yesterday (p. A16, The Real Midterm Election Stakes), writing this tomfoolery:
"If the election polls are
right, Democrats have a good chance of adding to their majority in the Senate
and even keeping it in the House. Toward that end they are trying to convince
voters that abortion and Donald Trump are the main election issues....Mr. Trump isn’t even on the
ballot this year, and Joe Biden will be President at least through 2024."
But Trump does plan to run, you can make book on it, as it's the only surefire way he can protect himself from the encircling maw of the justice system - state, federal, and local e.g.
So the WSJ as usual is batshit off the rails. But why wouldn't it be as it represents the same hardcore reactionary right media now that Blish was likely thinking about in 1963. Indeed, the Journal also existed back then and babbled the same load of twaddle to as many who'd slurp it up, i.e. (in their current editorial):
"the Democratic election
strategy is a new version of their 2020 campaign bait-and-switch. Joe Biden and
Democrats in Congress won by making the election a referendum on Mr. Trump and
Covid-19. But once in office they pivoted to advance a far-left labor agenda
and enact the biggest expansion of government in modern history."
But it seems James Blish was totally correct that the threat to our freedom is at a critical cusp, and too many lack the wherewithal to see it, appreciate it. The internet was still decades from development to the point it's at today, but even then Blish could sense or intuit rapid energy changes that mind undermine societal cohesion. Which is exactly what the net has done: balkanized the country into distinct social, cultural and political universes. The fact the WSJ editors do not perceive the existential threat from Trump - even though he's not running (yet)- shows how cut off from rational processing they are.
James Blish saw the threat of new demagogues even in July, 1963, and author Timothy Snyder saw it in terms of Hitler's Enabling Act - highlighted in the first episode of the new PBS series 'The U.S. and The Holocaust'. As Snyder put it: "Hitler had to undo the Weimar democracy in order to prevent leftists or a left agenda ever gaining traction." The outcome, of course, was a Nazi nationalist dictatorship. We face an analogous authoritarian dictatorship on the Right - not the left- as the WSJ editors believe.
Hopefully, to use Blish's turn of phrase: "We can still process the freedom of choice to do something about it."
See Also:
— from The New Civil Rights Movement
Excerpt:
Donald Trump‘s Ohio weekend rally is being held up as a warning by critics who say it was a dystopian display of fascism and are sounding the alarm on his supporters’ religious-like supplication to QAnon and the former president – complete with a disturbing salute.
Central to their argument is this moment, at the end of Trump’s rally, when supporters raised their arms, holding one finger pointed in a QAnon reference, which many saw as far too close to, as The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin writes, the Nazi salute.
by Jaime O’Neill | September 20, 2022 - 6:44am | permalink
Excerpt:
It should be apparent to any conscious organism that the Republican Party has not only gone to Maximum Fascist Mode, but is still actively pursuing just how much lower it can go without the whole damn country having a collective fit of projectile vomiting (oligarchs, evangelicals, habitual Fox viewers, misogynists and racists exempted, of course). Lindsey Graham (Lacy, to his friends) wants a national ban on abortion
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