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| 1958.......What a year. |
I have a whole series of "pet fantasies." One of my favorites is the good old "time-warp" fantasy. I get to go back in time like those guys did in that stupid Irwin Allen television show The Time Tunnel back in the 1960s.
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| ...1966...One of the dumbest TV shows of all time. |
If you're old enough to remember The Time Tunnel, it was one of the most idiotic shows ever filmed. (Well, everything Irwin Allen did was idiotic; "idiotic" was his trademark.)
On this show, the government was (secretly, it goes without saying) working on a massive boondoggle, "Project Tic-Toc," (underground, in the western desert, of course, you know, where they see all the UFOs?) trying to build a "tunnel" that could transcend time.
As the plot would invariably have it, rumors circulate that the government is about to scrap this project. (I would. Wouldn't ANY taxpayer?)
Then James Darren, (whom those old enough to remember will recall as "Moondoggie" in the "Gidget" movies with Sandra Dee), a young idealist who fervently believes in the project, decides to prove to everyone that it works. So, without permission, he twiddles the dials, dashes into the Time Tunnel, and disappears into the past!
Robert Colbert goes after him, and for one TV season anyway, Whit Bissell and the rest of the gang back in subterranean Arizona try to retrieve these two characters as they, Darren and Colbert, bounce around everywhere from the Titanic to ancient Troy (and I think they meet Billy the Kid somewhere along the way.)
I have had this fantasy, the fantasy of going back in time.
But in my case, the fantasy usually does not involve significant incidents in history. That was one of the most idiotic things about the idiotic Time Tunnel; these guys seemed to always land in some historical spot that was famous, you know, like the deck of the Titanic or the walls of Troy.
They never seemed to land in the middle of some unknown farmer's field in Mesopotamia, circa 4,000 B.C., where nothing special was going on except cows shitting.
My time-warp fantasy only has one significant historical locus: I wonder how I could have messed with history if I had been in Pontius Pilate's position in first century Judaea.
Knowing what I do about Roman history -- and I have studied it -- I could see myself refusing to turn Jesus over to that mob..."just to be a prick," as my father used to say.
"Who's procurator here? You or me?" I could hear myself shouting. "Beat it, all of yiz! Hit the bricks!"
Then we'd see how Jesus, determined to get himself crucified, would get me out of his way. (Or if he'd even bother.) I could see myself putting him under my protection, inviting him to have supper, maybe even washing his feet (just to be a smartass.)
About that time, God the Father would probably strike me dead with a thunderbolt for screwing with his plans, (again, just to get this nuisance out of the way.)
But if you gotta go, tweaking God's nose can't be beat as a great way to do it.
Besides, dammit, I'm an American. I have a better sense of justice than the Romans did. And Jesus was innocent of any crime! I'd like to think I would have told the lynch mob to get lost. You know, faced 'em down, like Wyatt Earp. Or John Wayne, Or one of those cool guys.
Anyway...
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| Hugh Beaumont (1909-1981) played the father, Ward Cleaver, on the TV series Leave It To Beaver. |
My favorite fantasy is the one where I go back in time, not to some big event like the Crucifixion or the Titanic, but to some imaginary scenario where I get to fill in the chronological "locals" on stuff that's going to happen in the future. Not the big stuff, usually: the small stuff.
But, then again, the small stuff often IS the big stuff, isn't it? Who, in 1876, thought that this new gadget the telephone was going to redefine modern life?
Who suspected that the internal combustion engine was going to make the blacksmith, a town-and-village fixture for centuries, into a man looking for a job?
Ask any twentysomething today what the word "blacksmith" even meant. They won't be able to tell you, because they don't know. They don't know anything. They weren't taught anything in school except that they should have high self-esteem.
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| Barbara Billingsley (1915-2010) played the mother, June Cleaver, on Leave It To Beaver. |
That's about all they know -- I'd be willing to bet most of them never even heard of Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the prototype of that very gadget on which they're now breathlessly telling their friends, "OMG! Jessi told Sarah that Ashley likes Mason, lol!!!"
Yecch.
Okay, now that I got that out of the way, here's my fantasy:
I follow Darren and Colbert into the Time Tunnel, and after the requisite pops and bursts of smoke to show that Project Tic-Toc still isn't working right, I'm deposited into ...
the living room of Ward and June Cleaver on Leave It To Beaver, circa 1958. The Cleavers were very nice people, and if I had to land somewhere in the past, I think I would just as soon it be the Cleavers' living room as Golgotha. We could even do a Pleasantville thing here, and I could appear in black-and-white, like Ward and June themselves.
In fact, that might make it even more fun.
They wonder who I am and where I come from. I'm not sure myself. But we could borrow a page from The Time Tunnel and have Ward and June remark, (sotto voce to each other of course because they're too polite to offend me) that I'm dressed strangely: they're not used to seeing an adult wearing blue jeans and a San Diego Padres T-shirt -- suits and ties are all they ever see men wearing. (Besides, in 1958 the San Diego Padres were still a Pacific Coast League team and the Cleavers probably never heard of them.)
But they quickly perceive that I'm as harmless as I am dazed, and June offers me coffee. I don't want them to think I'm crazy and call the butterfly-net boys, so I'm not going to come right out and tell them that I appeared out of the future. They'd never understand Project Tic-Toc. I still don't. Still, they can't help but notice that there's something a tad unusual about me.
Thinking quickly, (which I've never been able to do, by the way) I tell them that I'm on the faculty of -- quick, what state was Mayfield, the Cleavers' home town in? I always thought Illinois, but the show never said so -- uh...State University. (There's a nice generic term.) We've been doing some research on a government contract (very hush-hush, like every stupid, idiotic, wasteful thing the government does) and...uh...uh....that's how I came to be here. Can't tell you much more than that.
"How do you take your coffee, Mr. Dupuis?" June politely asks.
"Black, thank you," I reply, shaking my head theatrically to emphasise that I'm still a little bit dazed. "I'll just call and have someone come get me, if you'll tell me your address."
Here I pull my first faux-pas: I reach for my cellphone.
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| This is now considered an antique. But prior to 1970, just about every telephone in America looked like this, except the wall units, of course. |
"What is THAT thing?" Ward asks. My flip-phone looks a little like one of the communicators from Star Trek, but Star Trek itself is still eight years away.
"Oh, THIS thing?" I say, hastily shoving it back into my pocket. "It's a....a cigarette lighter. I forgot for a moment that I gave up smoking."
I think of asking to use their good old, standard black Bell Telephone unit, but who would I call? "We've no place to go in this time," as I remember Scotty telling Captain Kirk on an episode of Star Trek in which the U.S.S. Enterprise found itself in a time-warp situation similar to this one, only they weren't being hosted by the Cleavers. (Come to think of it, that might have been a lot of fun, too.)
June offers me more coffee.
"Well, Kelley," says Ward, humoring this goddamn nut in his living room, "What sort of research are you involved with, up there at State University?" (Or down there, as the case may be.)
"Uh, well, it's....uh, electronics."
"Electronics, really?"
"Yup," I sip my coffee, trying frantically to think of how I'm going to con my way out of this.
"Well, what can you tell us about the electronic world of the future?" Ward asks, with that feigned chuckle he used to use on the show when he was more anxious than amused.
"Yes, Kelley," June chimes in, ever the faithful spouse-as-sidekick, "What wonders are you electronic geniuses cooking up?"
Geniuses? Oh, yeah! Us guys! Well, okay, uh....
At this point there's no longer any question of my being able to bullshit these nice people. I might as well just uncork the whole nauseating vision and let them call the loony bin.
"Let's see. As of this year, the transistor has already replaced the vacuum tube. That was a step forward, obviously. We no longer have to wait five minutes for our radios and television sets to warm up, and don't have to worry about them overheating either. But...um, um, let's see. Well, we're working on a concept (yeah, right: Bill Gates was three years old in 1958, in fact he's two weeks younger than I), we call the "microchip." It's going to replace the transistor."
"Really? 'Microchip?' " says Ward politely. "What in the world could that be?"
"Believe it or not, it's going to be, if we ever get it developed, a sliver of silicon smaller than your pinkie fingernail, which will hold more information than any of today's (1958's) room-sized computers. Computers are going to get smaller and smaller and faster and faster in the decades ahead of us. You'll live to see it. At least one of you will live to see a day when the computer is as accepted a part of the average American household as the TV set is now."
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| In the 1950s, laptop computers were still some distance away. |
"Which one of us will live to see it?" June asks.
I blanch, then panic. "Even if I knew when someone was gonna die, I wouldn't tell them, and I don't claim to know," I add hastily. (Barbara Billingsley outlived Hugh Beaumont by close to 30 years.)
Geez, if I claimed to know when these people were going to die, one of them would call 911 immediately, were it not for the fact that in 1958 there was no such thing as 911.
"You guys are working on a silicon chip that will make computers that small?" Ward asks.
Ooh. Who the hell are 'us guys?' I stir my coffee. "Well, it's only at the talking stage. Nobody's actually tried developing any such thing. It's just something we, you know, yak about over coffee." I'm hoping this establishes my bona fides as a sane person, distracting the poor Cleavers from the fact that I just dropped out of The Time Tunnel and into their living room.
"But it is possible?" Ward presses me.
"Yeah, theoretically, it is. It's just that nobody's figured out a way to do it yet." And wouldn't, for another 15 years or so. "But if and when it does happen, I think it's going to really change the way we live. Imagine a world in which you can sit down in your living room and access, well, basically, the entire Library of Congress. I mean, everything will be out there, and all you'll have to do is type a few words on a keyboard, and there it is."
"Unbelievable," says June.
"Yes. But it's coming. I really think it's coming. Your sons, Wally and Beaver, (how do I explain knowing who THEY are?) will watch their own children cheating on their homework by copying stuff off the Internet, you know, the way kids copy stuff out of the encyclopedia now."
"Internet?" says Ward.
About this time, I'm wishing that the guys back in Arizona would get that Time Tunnel gadget working again and zap me to ... well, probably the wrong place. But I'd rather be telling Napoleon that he'd better postpone Waterloo than try to explain to these people about the Internet.
Still ... this is kind of fun. I ask June for some more coffee. She's a wonderful hostess. She not only brings me more coffee, but a cinnamon roll, baked just that morning at the Mayfield Bakery, to go with it.
"Thank you," I say to her. "By the way, do you really do housework in high heels?"
"No, but the network insists that I wear them," she replies. "Their reasoning is, in another season or two, Jerry and Tony are both going to be taller than I am, and they don't want me to look like the boys' kid sister."
I knew there had to be a reason.
Ward's still humoring me. "Are we going to see things like flying cars and space travel?"
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| I had to tell Ward Cleaver that we haven't seen anything like this yet, and probably won't. |
Will men walk on the moon? Yes, and the Americans get there first. You'll both live to see that. But it didn't last long. After a few moon-landing missions, Congress cut off the money and, as of the early 21st century, man has not been back to the moon in some 30 years. There's just a lot of junk lying around up there that we left, including a golf ball. Yeah, one smart-aleck astronaut decided he just had to experience what it would be like to hit a golf ball on the moon. He did it, and in one-sixth gravity, the thing carried probably farther than one of Babe Ruth's home runs.
"Flying cars? No. In fact, you'd be surprised at how little the technology of the automobile is actually going to change in the next 50 years. I mean sure, there will be design and engineering changes, reflecting, among other things, an outrageous increase in the price of gasoline which makes people want more fuel-efficient cars. But the car of 2008 is still essentially the car of 1958, just without the fins. It's a thing that burns gasoline, and gets you a speeding ticket if you're not careful.
Air travel is with us to stay. In fact by the mid-1960s nobody, in the United States anyway, travels by train anymore, or crosses the Atlantic on an ocean liner. They fly. It's faster. It already is. That's not to say the railroads and shipping companies will go out of business; of course they don't. They just sort of get themselves out of the passenger business and concentrate on the freight business instead. Because believe it or not, in the year 2000, the steel wheel on the steel rail is still the most efficient way to move large amounts of freight. And as for ocean ships, well, if you have 250 automobiles manufactured in Japan, and you want to get them to San Francisco, sticking them on an enormous freighter is a better idea than flying them over one at a time. So trains and ships are still with us, even though for most people, travel of more than a couple of hundred miles usually involves an airplane, not a train or a ship. There are cruise ships, but that's just for people who want to take expensive vacations.There's a federally-subsidized passenger rail service called Amtrak, which seems to stay with us year after year although it loses money like a sieve. Basically it operates between Washington D.C. and Boston. It's not efficient anywhere else; America's just too big for trains. Everyone flies."
About this time, Ward starts to get seriously suspicious.
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| How I might have landed in the Cleavers' living room. |
Sigh. I can't tell them about Project Tic-Toc. "Have you ever heard of a 'wormhole?'" I ask.
"No."
"It's a concept in physics. Theoretically, it's possible for someone to move from one time to another. I think I might have encountered one. It wasn't my idea, believe me. I wasn't trying to travel in time, it just happened. Ten minutes ago I was in the year 2011, now here I am in 1958.
"Now, BEFORE you call the cops, let me show you something!" (Thank God, my wallet is still on me.) This is my WALLET I'm pulling out, folks. It is NOT a gun! I don't own a gun!"
I pull out my driver's license. "Look at that," I say, handing it to June, who looks at it and then, with the same astonished look on her face she had when Wally and the Beav came down to dinner wearing stocking caps in the episode where Wally gave Beaver a haircut and just about scalped him, hands it to Ward.
"That's my driver's license, issued by the State of California," I say. "Look at the dates on it. It gives my date of birth as October 12, 1955. It expires on October 12, 2015. Now, according to that driver's license I'm not yet three years old. But look at me, I wouldn't carry around a thing like that as a gag. My sense of humor isn't that weird."
"So, you..." Ward begins
"I'm thinking I stumbled into a wormhole," I say. "Don't ask me. We've been messing with some things up there (or down there) at State University that even I don't understand. All I know is what I just told you. Ten minutes ago I was in the year 2011. Now I'm here in '58. By the way, is Groucho Marx on tonight? You Bet Your Life? That's still on, isn't it?"
"Yes, but not tonight," Ward says.
"Well, I'm sorry. As you can see from my driver's license, in 1958 I was not yet three years old. I've seen some of the old shows, but mostly I only remember them from DVD or videotape."
"I've heard of videotape, but what is DVD?" June asks.
"Oh, it's not even worth getting into," I say. "Just a gadget. It stands for 'Digital Video Disc.' Just a gadget."
Ward hands me back my driver's license. "You...you're really from the future?"
"It would seem so. Your future, not mine. I could tell you the year you're going to die, but I won't. Don't worry -- it isn't for a long time yet. You're going to be around for quite a few more years. My own date of death I don't know. That's part of my future, not yours. So...You gonna call the cops and have me picked up?"
"I don't see why," Ward says. "You may be nutty, but you seem perfectly calm. You're not raving. Finish your coffee. Then we'll decide what we should do next."
"Thanks, I appreciate that."
June straightens her dress. "Well," she says, "assuming this crazy story is true, and you did just....land here from somewhere in the future, tell us...what is life in the future going to be like?"
"Not as different as you might imagine," I say, thankful that they're not running into the street screaming for the National Guard. "We have more gadgets, and things move a bit faster, but basically, life in the early 21st century is still just life. People get up, go to work or school and come home just as they do now. They get married, have children and die, just as they do now."
"What about the Cold War?" Ward asks. "Did either side ever win?"
"Our side did. But not the way you might imagine. There was never a Third World War, although plenty of people were predicting it. The Soviet Union was never conquered, it just ran out of money. The USSR shut down in 1991. Incredible as it may seem, the map of eastern Europe in 1992 looks pretty much like the map of eastern Europe in 1912. The Russians simply realized that they couldn't afford to maintain an empire anymore. They were running out of oil money -- oil, that's what modern history is really all about. Some historians think the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because they were afraid that American naval power might threaten their sources of oil in southeast Asia.
"Anyway, the USSR officially went out of business on Christmas Day, 1991. After that it was just Russia again."
"Does Russia become a democracy?" June asks.
"Not the way you and I understand it, no. Russia in 2011 is basically being run by a tightly-insulated circle of crooks, mainly for their own benefit. But they're no longer trying to convert the world to an idealogy, like the Soviets were. They're just stealing fortunes for themselves. But the Iron Curtain came down. Stalin's idea of sealing off Russia from the rest of the world turned out to be just too expensive."
"And the Red Chinese?" Ward asks.
"Oh, yeah. China. China made its own particular deal with the devil. China in the early 21st century is still officially a communist country. There's no political freedom there. But economic freedom, well, that's another story. The Coca-Cola company, believe it or not, moved into China in 1978. By 2000 China was swarming with private companies, making money like crazy, and the Chinese government went along with it, because they were making money too. And being essentially a slave economy, China became for western companies -- guess what? -- a source of cheap labor. Today, in 1958, 'Made In Japan' is the sobriquet for cheap goods, right? By 2005, 'Made in China' has replaced 'Made in Japan' as that sobriquet. 'Made in China,' 'Made in Bangladesh,' anywhere companies can get buck-an-hour labor."
"Where in the heck is 'Bangladesh?'" Ward asks.
"Oh, that's uh...I think today it's called East Pakistan. It broke away and became a separate country around 1970 or so. A number of countries in south Asia and Africa are going to get new names as colonialism sort of recedes. Can I think of some more? Uh, what's now Upper Volta is going to become Burkina Faso. Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe. A lot of those countries renamed themselves when they gained independence. South Africa is still South Africa, but they finally got rid of apartheid."
"Apartheid? What on earth is that?" June asks, her pearl necklace jiggling.
"Official policy of racial segregation. You never heard of it? It's like what we have in Mississippi now, in 1958. Well, A lot of people in the United States are going to start raising hell, just a few years from now, about racial segregation here -- it's already started, in fact; you may have read in the papers a few years ago about Brown vs. Board of Education in, I think it was, Topeka? That's just the beginning. There's a lot more of that coming. Segregation in the American south is going to be done away with after much, MUCH trouble, and the same in South Africa, only it takes longer. But Nelson Mandela, a black guy who kind of spearheaded the campaign against apartheid in that country, after spending a lot of time in prison, wound up as South Africa's president before he died. History pulls funny stuff that way." (I almost said "funny shit," but then remembered who I was talking to.)
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| How do I explain 900-channel cable TV to Ward & June? |
"That's just part of it," I explain. "Mostly, the speeding-up of life results from all those damned gadgets I just mentioned. Okay, look..." I reach back into my pocket. "This isn't really a cigarette lighter," I say, brandishing my Verizon flip-phone. "This is a telephone. Here, look at it," I hand it to Ward.
"This little thing is a telephone? But it's not connected to anything! Where's the cord?"
"It doesn't need one."
"But how on earth does it...work?"
"Today, in 1958, it doesn't. That thing's just a paperweight in this world. And I almost wish it would remain one, because if you ask me, the cellular telephone was the most obnoxious invention of all time. Essentially what happened was, they created a global network of microwave systems, and these tiny telephones work by means of those microwave networks. In 2011 you can make a phone call from your car as easily as you make one from your kitchen now. And a lot of idiots do, and it causes a lot of traffic accidents. Convenience encourages stupidity. People do stupid things because they can. Imagine being on the subway -- and in 2011 we do still have subways -- and being forced to listen to some idiot sitting next to you, having an argument with his wife on the telephone. Happens all the time. I hate those damn things. I wish I didn't have it. I'm glad I'm in '58 for the moment, where the stupid thing doesn't work."
"So...People are making telephone calls from their cars, and on the subway," Ward says. "I can see where that might get to be a problem."
"You have no idea," I say, rolling my eyeballs.
"What else makes life...faster in your time?"
"Television is a biggie."
"Yes, yes. Tell us what's going to happen with television."
"Oh, you don't want to know. It just gets worse and worse, because there's more and more of it, and it's all the same garbage," I say. "Starting about half a dozen years from now, something called 'cable' begins creeping into our lives. We folks here in '58 all have antennas on our roofs, and we get NBC, CBS and ABC and that's about it. Look at any suburb from an airplane and it looks like a chicken coop, all those antennas on all those houses. Well, the antennas gradually start to disappear as cable services become available. They will hook a cable up to your TV set and you'll be able to get more channels. Of course, you have to pay for that, like you would a magazine subscription, but over the years it greatly increases the number of channels everyone is able to get. The two things feed each other: the more cable, the more channels. By 2011 you can hook up to maybe 900 channels. But it's all the same old trash. It's just that there's so much more of it, it becomes specialized to an incredible degree. Ward, do you like to play golf?"
"Yes, I do play on the weekend sometimes."
"Well, by 2000 there's a Golf Channel. You can just watch golf all the time if you want. There's also a cooking channel, a real estate channel, a couple of channels just for women" -- I nod at June -- "a channel for African-Ameri- sorry, I think here in '58 we still call them 'negroes,' -- a channel for surgery...you name it, it's sickening. Because it has totally fragmented our society. In 1958 almost everybody watches The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night. By 2005 no two people are watching the same channel at any given time. Everyone's just watching the channel that panders to their particular interest. A country in which 900 people are watching 900 different channels is no longer a country.
"But you asked about the speeding-up of life. Television advertising time eventually gets so expensive that commercials get shorter and shorter and louder and louder. In 2010 I watched an old film of some television commercials from 1963. That was the year Leave It To Beaver went off the air, by way."
"We're going to lose our jobs in 1963?" June asks.
"Yeah, but don't worry about it," I say. "You'll both find plenty of work. So will Jerry and Tony. Anyhow, when I watched these 1963 television commercials from 2005, I couldn't get over how slow they were. TV still hadn't completely severed the umbilical cord that attached it to 1940s radio, and television ads were as leisurely in 1963 as radio ads had been after the Second World War. It wasn't unusual in 1963 for a TV ad to go on for two full minutes. By 2005 that was long, long past. TV advertising time is so expensive in the 21st century, and people's attention spans are so short, that advertisers have basically 15 seconds to BLAST their message at you, and believe me, they do. It's one of the reasons I stopped watching TV."
"I almost hate to ask this, but...in 2010, is there still baseball?" Ward asks.
"You might wish there weren't," I reply. "Yes, there is still baseball. There is still Major League Baseball. In fact, this T-shirt I'm wearing, which I'm sure you wondered about? The San Diego Padres, who are currently in the Pacific Coast League, joined the National League as an expansion team in 1969. Since Mayfield is (I think) in Illinois, correct me if I'm wrong...(Ward and June both turn away, embarassed--they're not sure where Mayfield is, either), you probably never heard of the Padres. Well, Ward, if you're a baseball fan, you have heard of Ted Williams. He played for the San Diego Padres in the 1930s before he signed with the Red Sox. He's going to retire in 1960, and hit a home run in his last game, by the way.
"But baseball will look much different in the future. The 'reserve clause,' which has kept players in a state of virtual serfdom for more than 50 years, owned by their teams and unable to improve their lot, was abolished in 1974. After that, player salaries skyrocketed to such heights that fans began to complain. When a pitcher like Kevin Brown signs a contract with the Dodgers for $100 million --"
"$100 million?" Ward's eyeballs just about pop out. "Well, when they moved to Los Angeles last year, I could have predicted something like that would happen. But $100 million???"
"Keep in mind, Mr. Cleaver, that $100 million in the currency of the year 2000 is considerably less than $100 million dollars here in 1958," I say. "History, as Will Durant said, is inflationary. Money always gets cheaper. By 2000, a dollar won't buy what a quarter will now."
"Still. $100 million dollars?"
"Yes. Even in the year 2000, some eyebrows went up. But Brown's payoff was spread over a seven-year contract, and as so often happens when ballplayers sign these 'monster' contracts, he promptly disintegrated as a pitcher. The game remains the same, by which I mean there are still nine players on the field, and four bases 90 feet apart. But by 2011 there are 15 teams in each league, the American and the National, stretching all the way from Miami to Seattle. That means divisions, and playoffs. The World Series is still played where I come from -- in 2011 the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Texas Rangers -- but with all the additional teams and the layers of playoffs, the Series is played close to Halloween, rather than in early October as it always has been."
"Doesn't it get COLD?"
"Yes. Sometimes, when you're watching a World Series game on television in 2011, the camera will pan across the audience and they'll all be so bundled up you'd think you were watching a football game."
"And the players?"
"They put up with it. After all, they're being paid millions. And it is TV."
"Like this."
"Yeah."
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