January 19, 2022
Cathedral City, California
I woke up on the morning of New Year's Day with an old song from the late 60s in my head, "In the Year 2525," by Zager and Evans, a couple of one-hit wonders from Nebraska, of all places, who had a band called The Eccentrics. Although statistically speaking, some famous and semi-famous people are bound to be from Nebraska (Johnny Carson and Henry Fonda come to mind immediately), I've always had trouble imagining anyone returning to and staying in Nebraska after fame has touched them, however briefly. But this is just what Denny Zager, one-half of that duo did. Now in his late 70s, he lives and builds custom guitars somewhere in the Cornhusker State. The other half, Rick Evans, died in 2018 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I don't have much more to say about Zager and Evans, the guys, because that's all I cared to find out from Google. And it's enough about them. Unless they sold and signed away their royalty rights to the song (a distinct possibility, given the shady nature of the record business), this tune must have generated a nice modest income for them, having sold millions of copies over the years and having been played on oldies stations for decades to come.
The song, as its name states, is about the future, and how things will be dramatically different. And like any such song, or story, or movie of the sort, it was wrought from the uneasy feeling that was generated (pre-social media, mind you), by the 1960s news of the fast-changing nature of things, scientific, political, and otherwise. The song was written earlier in the decade, but it came out in 1969, around the time the first men walked on the moon. And it even has a subtitle. The complete name of the song is "In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)." The latter two Latin words mean beginning and end, although really the song isn't about the beginning of anything in particular, just about the possible end of things, or maybe the beginning of the end, I don't know. I think it was an affectation put in there to give it a bit of an intellectual flavor.
The song is basically silly and self-parodying, but I think it's meant to be taken seriously. It fancifully predicts various changes in human conditions over thousands of years. Here I might as well set out at least some of the lyrics, in case you weren't around when it came out, or have forgotten, or were living in a country where it didn't get any airplay:
In the year 2525, if man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today.
In the year 4545
You ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing to chew
Nobody's gonna look at you ....
And it goes on from there, at intervals of a thousand years or so, with humans needing less and less of our physical faculties, due to technology, and being able to choose test-tube babies, then ending with some expectation that God might come back and put an end to it all, because, of course, we've fucked everything up--we haven't taken care of the earth. This was a sort of amalgamation of Christian orthodoxy and the then-current thinking of disaster mongers like Paul Ehrlich (zero population growth), and a general uneasiness about technology that persists to this day.
The idea of a dystopian future based on technology gone awry wasn't new to Zager and Evans, of course. There was Orwell's 1984, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and that granddaddy of time travel books, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, which came out over 125 years ago. Really, when you think about it, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein sort of got that ball rolling back in 1818. But let's not forget that granddaddy of dystopian fantasies, the book of Revelation at the end of the Christian bible. At any rate, from the very birth of television and cinema we've been churning out stories by the truckload about the future gone off the rails, because they sell like hotcakes. Hotcakes gone horribly awry. The Hotcake that Ate Cincinnati.
The thing that practically all science fiction has in common, regardless of its media form, whether it's a lightweight pop song like "In the Year 2525," or a serious tome like Fahrenheit 451, or a series like the "Planet of the Apes" movies, is that it's not really about the future at all. Nor it is about the past. It's about the present, and the things in the present that scare us, whether they be pollution, or nuclear warfare, or runaway technology of some sort, or the evolution of species. And it's never about how much better things will be in the future, but rather about how messed up they've become. Which brings me to my main point.
Fear rules us. It is the motivator of all hatred, distrust, search for meaning, religious mumbo jumbo, you name it. The conglomeration of media machines that perpetuate fear are our main sources of information, and the touchstones of all our anxieties. Back before there was much in the way of mass media, fearmongering was almost exclusively in the adept hands of religious practitioners--the clergy, whether you called them priests or prophets or soothsayers. Keeping people in fear of danger on earth and eternal damnation has been the business of Christianity throughout its history, and a hell of a lot of money has been made by helping people to think they are staving off that damnation. And before Christianity, going back thousands more years, even farther than Zager and Evans went in the other direction into the future, fear of the unknown kept us as a species guessing and wondering what would happen next--famine, fire, eclipses, floods, injuries, attacks by predators, you name it. All fear, naturally, is based on our fear of the one thing over which we have no control whatever, namely, the fact that sooner or later we are all going to die.
But just a brief look back into human history ought to infuse any sensible person less with fear than with hope, at least in terms of what we're capable of doing technologically to postpone our inevitable demise. Yeah, sure, we've killed lots of people with wars. I'm not forgetting that. But as far as what we've been able to accomplish for the overall success and longevity of our species, we've really kicked ass. Let's go back just a hundred years, a mere twinkle in the eye of the Almighty, if we're disposed to think in such terms. In 1918, when the influenza pandemic was sweeping the world, we had no penicillin to fight off the secondary bacterial pneumonia that was one of the main reasons the flu killed so many people rather than just making them sick and miserable. Smallpox was deadly everywhere because medical science hadn't yet perfected mass inoculation against it. Diabetics routinely died because insulin injections hadn't been developed. Tuberculosis was something to fear, as well as diphtheria and whooping cough and yellow fever and cholera and a host of other illnesses or conditions. In fact, a century ago infectious diseases of all kinds were the leading cause of death, period. But besides that, people clogged their arteries simply as a byproduct of their normal diets, and high blood pressure was considered inevitable, so heart attacks and strokes just happened once you got to a certain age. Cancer was considered pretty much unpreventable. Those things all happen now, too, but a hundred years ago human life expectancy was at least twenty years less than it is today. And that's just the medical side of things.
A century ago most people didn't have telephones or television. Cars went 30 or 40 miles per hour tops, and the roads they bumped along on weren't much good. Air travel was barely in existence. Computers hadn't been invented. Human sanitation still mostly consisted of outhouses and pumps on the back porch and ditches filled with sewage that ran indiscriminately into the nearest river or ocean. Women were even more restricted in their opportunities and independence than they are today. It was against the law to be anything other than hetero in your sexual practices. And as for being nonwhite, well, forget about it--you just had to hunker down and take whatever shit the white man felt like dishing out. I could go on and on. And true enough, many of those things aren't even close to being fully corrected yet. But incrementally, we're getting better, not worse, than we were then. And still, we tend to be pessimistic in our predictions for the future. Bad news sells. Optimism doesn't. Humans seem to be born to be fearful, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Fear, I suppose, was wired into us at an early stage in our development, and hasn't left, only found new outlets.
Now, a thing like Covid has to give one pause, since it's not really a good piece of news for the human species, and shows how vulnerable we can be. But consider the fact that science and governments, in just two years, have fostered and created vaccines and boosters that effectively mitigate Covid's worst symptoms (so far at least), and have made these vaccines readily available, for the most part, to those who choose to get them, and also, come to think of it, to the stupid assholes who refuse to get them. The virus, which only wants to live, like we do, has, thanks to those unvaccinated people, stayed alive and well, but also has mutated into a form that is much more alive and well than its original version, if less deadly at present. Viruses don't want to kill off their hosts, they just want to be able to pass successfully from one host to another. But here's the good news. Even an unscientific guy like me knows all that, thanks to the diligence of the scientific community. And the scientific community, in two years, knows more about this virus than it learned about smallpox or cholera or the plague over hundreds or even thousands of years. So that's a bit of a silver lining in the dark cloud that hangs over us currently.
Nevertheless, we'll continue to be bombarded by worst-case scenarios, both in the news media and in the science fiction extensions of our current fears. And the lines between the two will continue to blur. I don't know how many people actually believe in zombies and vampires and the probability of a meteor hitting the earth soon, but I'll bet it's a significant percentage of the population. And an even larger percentage don't believe that medical science can assist us in managing things like Covid, if we would only listen. Now that's scary.
