Timelines Trembling Before the Collapse of the Wave Function

Boulder is so much it’s own bubble (we often call it “the People’s Republic of Boulder” or “Planet Boulder”) as close to a utopian town as you can find in America, no sign of the recession, a futuristic mountain town aglow with talent (the best educated city in America, also the most physically fit), the most olympic athletes per capita, aerospace, advanced software engineering, NCAR, NOAA and NIST. To some it feels like the world’s smallest Scandinavian country and yet, despite, this backdrop, there was this sense of the darker possibilities of the larger world, the possibility that the global financial system is teetering, the possibility that the libor scandal might be one catastrafuck too many for the spherical house of marked cards that is our global economy.

As we drove through the canyon, I pointed out an odd thing about this week. It was a week charged with events that had a weird present tense nostalgia, because these newly minted events resonated so strongly with the America of unstoppable optimism that I remembered from childhood.

One event of the week was Michael Phelps, a perfect American hero type, a wholesome innocence about him, a 27-year-old who still seems adolescent, who travels everywhere with his mom, winning so many more Olympic medals, becoming the greatest Olympian of all time, an American never to be surpassed, etc. Within a couple of days of that was the amazingly perfect landing of the Mars Curiosity Rover, which I stayed up to watch as a live feed from Nasa.gov, the most exciting space mission since Apollo.

I wrote about the rover landing as a Facebook Status update the same night:

Even more than Phelps, the rover landing resonated with childhood when it seemed that every couple of months there was a euphoric NASA mission control room because we had just pushed out the frontier of space in some unprecedented way again. I’ve been pointing out to people that there is an intense nostalgia going on for the early Sixties—the series Madmen, for example. It was the last time when American self-confidence and optimism in technological progress seemed supreme. There was the looming shadow of thermonuclear war with the Russians as a possibility, but we felt very sure of ourselves as the good guy in that conflict and we were culturally, technologically and economically so clearly their superior. Car ads usually included superlatives like “longer,” “wider,” “more horsepower than ever before.”

The epicenter for me, and for many, of this all confident optimism was the General Motors Futurama in the World’s Fair of 1964-65 in Flushing Queens, New York, which was a subway ride away for my family and we went there several times. You must see this two minute youtube to get a sense of why this exhibition, the most popular attraction of one of the few great World’s Fair,s was so mesmerizing. Millions of people from all over the world saw it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2YB6DdTBWk (watch it, watch it now). Its vision of a high tech utopian future was so convincing, and there was so little anxiety about environmental issues. (Yeah, there was Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, but that didn’t filter down to a seven-year-old or most Americans). The early Sixties was, oddly enough, a more futuristic time than the present era, even with our smart phones and such. It’s interesting that the last X Men film was set during that era and the recent Men In Black sequel went back in time to the 1969 Apollo launch, which also seems more futuristic than most of the big events of this day.

The flawless landing of Curiosity, and the victories of Michael Phelps, seemed a resurgence of that optimism. I wondered aloud about these events occuring so close to each other as we drove in the convertible through the winding canyon. Could this be a set up for the principle of enantiadromia (roughly the tendency to oscillate between extremes)? The American psyche gets these two shots of nostaligic /futurisitc optimism in just a few days— is that the counterpole set up for some dark shock to the body politic?

My friends dropped me off at the dentist and with little transition the brilliant sunshine, canyon and luxurious convertible were replaced with the dental chair and some particulary grusome deep drilling and grinding—lots of Novocaine for sure, but my skull was reverberating. (Trust me, I’m not complaining, I’m guiltily grateful that I am getting dental care). To occupy my mind I put in earbuds and listened to a Coast-to-Coast AM show. James Howard Kunstler was on, author of The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere http://www.kunstler.com/index.php.

Unlike so many who want to convey a dystopian view of the future— we’ve all heard the demented doomsayers, the fear porn folk, whom I usually dismiss—but this man was a rigorous intellectual and the vision he painted of a future timeline had a lot of grounded authority. The enforced stillness of the dental chair helped me to drill down into what he was saying and really picture it. He pointed out how confident and comfortable Germany, England and France were before World War I. A cascade of technological miracles was happening for them—telephones, airplanes, movies…and then— blood and rubble. I’m more on the side of my friend Rob Brezsny (father of Pronoia), more of an optimist. (see http://zaporacle.com/card/pronoiagood-things-are-goin-on/) Living in Boulder, a Star Trek future seems more possible than the Road Warrior-minus-any-gas-at-all future Kunstler sees. He does, however, see people having a better quality of relationships and community as the grid, internet and global commerce come apart in the future he forsees. What also made him so convincing is that he’s written fantasy novels about this future, so in the imaginal realm he’s lived it, and smelled it, and talks about it almost like a time traveler who’s actually witnessed it. His view of a global economy and technology-come-undone world, a world where people have withdrawn to small town agrarian life and don’t know much about what’s happening a couple of hundred miles away, is remarkably like the world of Stephen King’s Dark Tower books that are set in a future that is closer to the wild west. Paper is a rare commodity, but in a few hidden places remnants of abandoned high technology remain, as does radiation poisoning and many signs of genetic degradation.

It’s not that I believe in such a future; I believe more in the resourcefulness and inventiveness of the human species, but… one massive solar flare, like the Harrington Event of the 1850s, and every electronic everything could suddenly become a dysfunctional artifact of an era that we might not live to see again. I know there have been certain moments when I’ve walked into the brilliantly lit interior of a 20 aisle supermarket and wondered: How much longer can this go on? Tropical produce from thousands of miles away, an absurd abundance of food and food-like substances.
I’m not a true believer in Kunstler’s timeline or any other. It is one amongst the possible timelines vibrating around us. His view might be wrong, but no one can say it’s far-fetched. The lesson of history is that civilizations are fragile organisms, far more fragile than they seem when they are at their height. Today I felt the spooky vibration, the haunting sense of how the waveform of the future could collapse into an unexpected, and perhaps undesirable, form.