living in the future
Recently I’ve had a few moments of surreality, each of which left me thinking I had been transported to some astonishing future-time: walking back from Mo’s in Yerba Buena Garden in San Francisco; a documentary on mag-lev trains; and today, a black-and-white front-page photo of Obama.
- The decent from the upper level down to Howard from the Yerba Buena/Moscone complex looks like something out of Logan’s Run. The heterogenous complex of buildings and the panoply of the city beyond - I stopped just before the walkway bridging Howard and stared. I thought, not unhappily, of Trantor.
- Then the other night some hitler channel show on trains and a long segment on the maglevs. I remember reading about these, as ideas, when I was in high school, in ‘Science Digest’. (I once got beat-up for reading that. Good times.) In excess of 25 MPH the entire train is no longer touching the ground. I still can’t really get my head around that, even with a good appreciation of thermodynamics.
- And now today, Obama. A black american man is poised to become the President of the United States, the most powerful nation-state human society has ever produced. I know there has been a lot written about that versus the first woman president; Senator Clinton (who I do not admire) aside, I just don’t feel like that is such a big deal. Really. Western democracies have had Thatcher and others, and there are numerous women who have been prime ministers and such in the rest of the world.
But a non-white American president? It still boggles my mind. Perhaps I’m just too cynical about race and thus easily amazed? (The New York Times’ photo was certainly intentionally black-and-white. Perhaps to evoke a connection with Kennedy? The Sunday Times is usually in color, but maybe I have that wrong.)
May 21st, 2008 at 8:52 am
Little kids won’t even think twice when they see a black guy in the White House.
I need to catch up on my Science Digest too.
Great blog post.