GLIDING ON EMPTY

My father was born at the beginning of the 20th century, I was born in the middle of it and my grandchildren were born as the 21st century took off. Who saw the greatest change in his world? There is no question that my father experienced the most far-reaching and radical changes in technology, economics and politics.

Mark Steyn has a great article about this, as a way of bringing a sense of reality to those people who are so fond of saying that we live in a rapidly changing world … today. We’re not; not compared to the people born a century ago.

At the start of the summer, I attended a graduation ceremony in Vermont, for which a bigshot speaker had been flown up from New York. "Your world is changing so fast!" he told them, as is traditional on these occasions.

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Imagine that Vermont class a century ago, the summer of 1911. The Model T had just gone into production a couple of years earlier, the age of manned flight had gotten off the ground. And they had their version of Justin Bieber downloads, too: Do you know Lady Gaga's smash hit "Telephone"? It was the latest thing for ten minutes a year or so back. But they had telephone songs at the turn of the 20th century, too! "Hello, Ma Baby!" "Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven." They had lots of songs about other exciting new inventions, too: There were telegraph numbers ("There's a Wireless Station Down in My Heart"), automobile numbers ("Come Away with Me, Lucille, in My Merry Oldsmobile"), aeroplane numbers ("Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine"). There were so many inventions for singers to sing about, they had no time left to sing about the novelties of their own industry, in which the wax cylinder was about to be superseded by the 78-rpm phonograph record. In the years that that Vermont Class of 1911 had been in college, the Nickelodeon had led to a boom in what we would soon call motion pictures. And yet, what with all the other things going on — with electrification and the internal-combustion engine enabling man to conquer both night and distance, time and space, and other footling stuff — these exciting showbiz novelties were generally regarded as peripheral to progress. Instead of the be-all and end-all of it. In the second decade of the 21st century, technological innovation means we're thrilled if Apple invents a device for downloading Katy Perry that's an eighth of an inch slimmer than the previous model. So today, instead of songs for the age of invention, we have inventions for an age of songs.

Most of what we mean by progress in our "fast moving" world falls into a kind of James Bond gizmo category. Things that half a century back were issued to 007 by Q at the start of his mission are now available for $19.95 at Wal-Mart

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Air travel went from Wilbur and Orville to biplanes to flying boats to transatlantic jetliners in its first 50 years, and then for the next 50 it just sat there... Yet that graduation ceremony in Vermont caused me to wonder if we're not stuck in mid-century in a more profound sense: We have the attitudes not of the young capitalist who builds the assembly line for the mass-production automobile but of the elderly titan half a century later preoccupied with his memorial foundation to "effect social change worldwide." Indeed, in its attitude to both foreign policy and domestic priorities, America operates less like a nation-state prosecuting its interests and more like one of those non-profit foundations funding various unwatchable offerings on PBS. A great nation can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a glorious past. But, as the Wright brothers could have explained, gliding doesn't really meet the definition of "fast moving."

Are we tired, a nation of enervated people whose primary concern is maintain the status quo? Even as the Internet, UPS and Federal Express have made the Us Postal Service essentially obsolete, can we imagine getting rid of it just as we got rid of horses and wagons as the primary means of transportation? The transition from horses to cars was done primarily via private enterprise. Today, making major changes – from the USPS to the energy we use – is controlled and ruled by a government who sees as its primary objective the preservation of the perks and benefit it has created for its constituents and control of the direction of any new technology, which leads us directly to Solyndra.