Kill It

I’ve had little to write about lately. Usually, the blame for this weakness is based squarely on myself. It’s usually me who fails to level out each word, to keep up, to stay in the ether. I’ve been working hard at my fiction, and the Long Sunset has suffered for it. But the Long Sunset has also suffered because the biggest thing in the news now (and for some time) is the economy. This awful beast that envelopes every level of American society also works to destroy every creative molecule that’s left. Adrian Berry has a book where he speaks of a futuristic world in which technological advances are potent because of a time where the focus is taken away from the economy. He’s a communist and doesn’t realize it. But he’s got the idea, as every communist I’ve ever known has had.

Of course, they also don’t have the means. So about this economy: Just don’t care. Carl Sagan used to lecture on many things, but the one I’ve always found most interesting is this. Humans, overall, have always considered the fact that we’ve never received radio, x-ray or satellite transmissions from as alien worlds as proof that they don’t exist. He said (and I’ve listened to cassette tapes of his 1973 Stanford lectures a couple of times) that we assume that any civilization that is on our level (or, obviously, well past) would have the interstellar ability to communicate on an impressive scale. He then slices into how distant these civilizations actually are, and how remote their chances (no matter how sophisticated) actually are of reaching us. It’s very scientific. He’s a master of logic. Carl Sagan was Spock’s brother.

And yet at the very end of this lecture he tosses this out, randomly, as if he hasn’t thought it out: He says that distance between worlds is almost certainly the reason galactic civilizations cannot get in touch with us, but also that a planet could have evolved as ultra-intelligent and at the same time never have reached for the distinctive conquest of space. He said, maybe, there’s worlds with hyper-intelligent poets who live with 17th century technology.

He left it at that. Hyper-intelligent poets. Who, for some evolutionary reason that we can never understand, comprehend Wordsworth on a level that devastates our literary scholars, but have never thought to challenge the geek who works on our Compaq servers. And what, he makes clear, would be the intellectual difference between that world and ours? Even though we could never hear them.

So that brings me back to the economy. Or, as it stands for me, the biggest fucking waste of human intellectual energy that has ever been self created. The economy, how people make money, is a wasteful art. We’ve managed to bother this brilliant president with the work that is deserved of fraternity brothers who own car dealerships. We don’t look to the stars: We monitor the stock market, and pretend that our monetary well-being dominates the fold over our artistic achievements.

And it does. I sat outside tonight at 4 AM to watch an Atlas II rocket launch majestically into the night sky. It was propelling a spy satellite, or a GPS point-spotter, or a secret government magic eight ball, or something that’ll kill Arabs deep into the stratosphere. But to me, it represented this beautiful piece of technology that may very well represent the peak of scientific perfection for our generation (or not, Sagan would always argue for not). Either way, the Atlas Program will be dismantled in 2011 despite its pristine launch record because of, obviously, the economy. To the cause of our human fascination with which that is unreal. The unreal economy. The fluctuations of which are determined generally by the rich, who have little use for art, who cannot make it.

We may indeed enter a secondary dark age. One in which the moderately impressive technological improvements of the 20th century will work as an appropriate stopping point. Don’t think it’s not possible. Everyone has always assumed that technology will just continue to grow. But in all reality, we are due for a set-back, due for a time in which our grandfathers principals are more important than those set forth by our intellectual possibilities. Don’t doubt our ability to go backwards.