In my Doctor Who Children’s Annual there was a drawing of Albert Einstein within a sidebar to explain space and time. The box read, (from memory) “There can be no space without time; there can be no time without space.” So every location is in space-time. I find it liberating to give respect to other locations.
Seeing in “space-only” might at first glance seem appropriate for, say, pondering socialized medicine: Americans could look north to Canada, and east to Australia and Japan, west to Ireland, and beyond to the United Kingdom and western Europe: “Holy cow! Every foreign nation with any affluence has medicare, praise the Lord!” So much for “the eternal now.”
But if the dimension of “time” is added, then U.S. citizens could look at what Canada used to be like. Such as cost-benefit, when someone fell sick, for individual Canadians and their society, before their adoption of medicare. (Run by the provinces, with 22% federal dollars, not like how under the new “affordable care act” Washington would pay 95%, at first, of a state’s medicare) “Wow, there’s a reason everybody else in the developed world has medicare!”
Actually, I don’t think Americans are smart enough to say that, I’m just saying they could if they wanted to…
We like to think that progress goes only one way. Although maybe not for individuals: An employed man can decline into becoming a homeless drunkard for years, but that same man could then progress and make millions as the busy co-owner of the Second Cup franchise. (true story) In reality, if time runs like a rope through pulleys, then there is no ratchet, nothing to prevent slipping back, neither for cities nor countries. Of course we won’t realize this if we see only an eternal present. Maybe we should listen when Grandpa is grouching.
Someone wrote Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, someone else (footnote) wrote Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The empire is like a modern third world country—and very decadent. But the smaller Roman republic is a breathtaking example of virtue and democracy. Too bad their fall from grace, and the rise of Caesar, happened over a single generation. Both Romes, imperial and republic, occupied the same seven hills, but in two contrasting space-times.
I suppose that Star Trek episode, “Bread and Circuses,” takes place at Rome’s tipping point between self discipline and decadence. Remember? That’s the one where the gladiator fights are televised from a TV studio, complete with dials for pre-recorded boos and hisses.
My cute boyhood was North American: by shuffling my space-time “photographs” I get perspective: I try not to condemn my peers of the previous century for their Politically Correct fashions in thought, clothing, and television. I mean, come on: Youth worship? Bellbottoms?
I still get a kick out of television being in colour, but this year I’ve replaced the adjective “colour” with “flatscreen.” It would be too silly to say “a colour flatscreen TV.”
From re-runs, you may know that Lost in Space came along early enough for the first season to be in black and white, while Star Trek was late enough, just barely, for every season to be in colour. 1966-1969. I remember walking two miles, five kilometres, to a department store and finding a wall of glamorous TVs with their screens often showing the same channel but in different shades: The clerks still hadn’t gotten the hang of setting those three colour knobs. Jeanie had green skin. I went home and eagerly reported what colour the Star Trek uniforms were.
Back then, a constant topic of conversation was, “Have you got a colour TV?” Things were similar—got a 10-speed?—a few years later, when 10-speeds came in to swiftly replace those awful new-fangled-to-me mustang bikes with their tiny wheels and banana seats. As a minority of one, I rode a classic “safety bicycle,” with big wheels for good mechanical advantage, just like the bike in the Boy Scout manual. I wonder what the non-safety bike was? A penny farthing? (There were several p-f’s up on the wall decorating the local bike shop)
I suppose just as we used new 10-speeds to leapfrog past sensible safety bikes to get away from mustangs, so too we leapfrogged, over the plain monotone swimming trunks of my dad and my grandpappy, by seizing on new colourful “board shorts.”No doubt to get away from feeling immodest: As some feminists sadly found, there’s no ratchet to keep society liberated.
On campus, for the swimming pool diving board, I noticed that only the best male swimmers wore speedos, as did all of the guys on the swim team. Everybody else? We wore nice comfortable non-speedo “jockey style” bathing suits. The space-time? 1960’s to 1980’s. Unhappily, big shorts would feel like frigid seaweed: Once out of the water—yuck! Right now, just like mustangs were in 1971, “board shorts” are the dominant fashion. Even a thousand miles inland, where none of us have ever seen a surfboard.
What’s next? Could males leap to what the ladies call a “boy-shorts” fashion? Would I? To avoid freezing my legs? I guess so. I mean, sure I would like to become youthful, hip and liberated.
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Sean Crawford comments are welcome for even the oldest posts,
In the foothills of the rocky mountains,
February,
2021
Footnotes for a snowbound day:
~The Rome book is a classic… not read much today, but constantly referenced by past generations. By Edward Gibbon.
~The Reich book was fascinating to my generation; it was even condensed by Readers Digest. As for German horror: “It captured it in a way that made amnesia impossible.” (Smithsonian) But perhaps the book is “too long, didn’t read” for comfortable millennials in this new century. By journalist William Shirer.
Politics of Protest
Russians speak of “television versus the fridge” meaning that they won’t join the protests against Putin if their refrigerator is comfortably full.
Romans speak of “bread and circuses” where a “circus” could be, say, a chariot race, or, on one occasion, flooding the coliseum to stage a naval battle. “Bread” was free, doled out to every citizen… During extreme unemployment, (not from automation, from slavery) the slogan described how the rich kept the “mob” distracted and comfortable, forestalling any revolution. With the public so wimpy, the legions became a real power, like how this month in Myanmar (Burma) the army overthrew democracy.
In later Rome the emperor, feeling nervous, had to create an elite “Praetorian Guard,” based right inside the city, to fight off any rival leading an army across the Rubicon. Like how Saddam Hussein had his elite “Republican Guard.”
Late Breaking
As a demonstration that the world is changing—that the “eternal now” is not the only space-time available—backed up with charts and graphs, and “only five out of fifty US states having…” Never mind.
Warning: This video is so shocking you’ll be tempted to escape by “killing the messenger,” or in this case, “screening out the messenger” through criticizing a trivial remark around his use of the “O group” for food. As did many in the comments, even when so many others had already said the very same thing—how tiresome.
