Saturday, August 28, 2004
Revolutionary Innovations
On the first morning of 2000, I looked out the window and said to my wife, "Where are the damn flying cars they promised us?" I once worked on an educational publishing project that required me to read thousands of student essays by kids in grades 3 through 8. One of the assignments asked kids if they would rather travel to the future or to the past. A significant percentage of those picking the future mentioned that one of the things they expected to find there were flying cars. Oddly enough, the second most-often-mentioned innovation was talking computers--which already exist. So maybe flying cars and talking computers are more like talismans of the future than tangible developments we expect to actually see. Nevertheless, NASA is working on something like a flying car. It may be quite a few years away--perhaps longer now than it seemed in 2000, what with our fears that anything used to fly can be used as a terrorist tool. (You know the Republicans are scared when they ban corporate helicopters from flying near the convention this week. If there were such a thing as a flying car, they'd have to have the convention in the Empty Quadrant of Nevada just to feel safe enough.)
Recommended Reading: Last summer about this time, John Ashcroft and the Justice Department went on a PR campaign to sell the Patriot Act. Part of the promotion was a website (which is still up) with a headline prominently featuring a quote from the Declaration of Independence--the one about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, followed by Jefferson's observation "That to secure these rights, governments are instituted. . . ." And that's where the quote ends. Ashcroft and company redacted it, just as if they'd blacked it out in the released version of a classified document. What Jefferson actually said is that "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." Which is a deeply revolutionary sentence, then and now--so it's no wonder it was excised by the Reverend Mr. Ashcroft as unfit to be seen by the website's intended audience.
So anyway: At the Memory Hole, Russ Kick recently uncovered another instance in which the Justice Department revealed its true colors by what it didn't permit to be said. And once again, I find myself more afraid of our own government than of any terrorist in the world.
On the first morning of 2000, I looked out the window and said to my wife, "Where are the damn flying cars they promised us?" I once worked on an educational publishing project that required me to read thousands of student essays by kids in grades 3 through 8. One of the assignments asked kids if they would rather travel to the future or to the past. A significant percentage of those picking the future mentioned that one of the things they expected to find there were flying cars. Oddly enough, the second most-often-mentioned innovation was talking computers--which already exist. So maybe flying cars and talking computers are more like talismans of the future than tangible developments we expect to actually see. Nevertheless, NASA is working on something like a flying car. It may be quite a few years away--perhaps longer now than it seemed in 2000, what with our fears that anything used to fly can be used as a terrorist tool. (You know the Republicans are scared when they ban corporate helicopters from flying near the convention this week. If there were such a thing as a flying car, they'd have to have the convention in the Empty Quadrant of Nevada just to feel safe enough.)
Recommended Reading: Last summer about this time, John Ashcroft and the Justice Department went on a PR campaign to sell the Patriot Act. Part of the promotion was a website (which is still up) with a headline prominently featuring a quote from the Declaration of Independence--the one about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, followed by Jefferson's observation "That to secure these rights, governments are instituted. . . ." And that's where the quote ends. Ashcroft and company redacted it, just as if they'd blacked it out in the released version of a classified document. What Jefferson actually said is that "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." Which is a deeply revolutionary sentence, then and now--so it's no wonder it was excised by the Reverend Mr. Ashcroft as unfit to be seen by the website's intended audience.
So anyway: At the Memory Hole, Russ Kick recently uncovered another instance in which the Justice Department revealed its true colors by what it didn't permit to be said. And once again, I find myself more afraid of our own government than of any terrorist in the world.
