Cities on the Moon

Our Cranky Seer Tells how to Make the Next Century a Better One

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore! Forgive my borrowing Peter Finch's cry in Network. But I am mad as hell. Because on December 31, 1999 a mob of gullible freaks will douse their tonsils and jubilate their bods shouting, "Happy 21st century!"

A half billion champagne cocktails will drown those dimwits cramming hotels in Paris, New York and Las Vegas to speed the new millennium, their wives ripe with the first 21st century babes. Damn!

I've preached to the maniac ostriches all year. But, heads sunk in millennial sand, they pop more corks and bake more embryos. Now hear this: Stash the confetti. Recoil the ticker tape. Eiffel Tower, kill those mile-high numbers counting down to 2000. Millennial Santa just crashed with an empty sack. And while you caution your eager embryo to tread water another year, (continued on page 168) Cities on the Moon (continued from page 154) here are my predictions for the real start of the millennium, January 1, 2001.

Once I asked Edith Head, Hollywood's foremost costume designer, to foretell the future.

"In 2033," I said, "how will men and women dress?"

"No," she said. "If I promise fashions, they happen. Tomorrow arrives by noon today, and you must start over, imagining the impossible."

"Just guessing causes an instant tomorrow?"

"We imagined the Moon, didn't we? And the Eagle landed. We wished for Mars; the Viking cameras followed. So, predictions ensure. What do you want from the universe? Dream, then shout it loud and clear or there will be no new New Year's. But watch it! You may get what you shout."

I dare to shout our future now.

First, we must wish ourselves back to the Moon.

There we must build space stations on hard lunar rock, escaping the gravities of raw space. Why? More of this later.

Meanwhile-- In the first hundred years of the third millennium, a few dozen new universities will be added to our educational rosters. Let's name a few. The University of Sing Sing. The campus of the Illinois Penitentiary and San Quentin College and Alcatraz U.

Strange?

Strange, yes, because new.

Beyond 2001 we will learn what we should always have known: Punishment is not enough.

Repentance through education might suffice.

By the gate of each penal school we will retranslate the Statue of Liberty's demand: Give me your vacant minds and useless passions, lend me your rootless self-destroyers, let all books be bibles, in monks' cells where the study of mankind will prevail.

And when these empty heads are full and these brutal hands can write, let there be tests, and those who at last can read, remember and understand what they read, let the portals open to set them free, punished but replenished, on their feet, not on their knees.

It's worth a try.

And now, a further wish and hoped-for resolution. Let all the nations and cities of the world for a little while be governed by women. We have ingested testosterone from the mouth of the cave, to the burned library of Alexandria, to unending world wars. Even as men are lousy drivers (check your insurance statistics), so are they lousy politicos who, guarding their ravenous egos, ignore their teeming brains. Not back-of-the-bus for men, no, but as side-seat advisors on how to get lost. For a few years, why not? Let women "man" the wheel.

And, please, no women who are macho-male clones with incipient biceps. Just ordinary, which means extraordinary, females who can mother-nurse-teach the world, with all that those labels imply. Men, confronted by problems, often depart. Women stay to sort baggage, clean souls and mend tempers.

Which is a natural lead-in to computers, Internets, e-mails and wide-screen-wall-to-wall-eyeball TVs. The world I depicted in Fahrenheit 451 in the early Fifties is fast targeting ground zero, not like an express train but like a brain meltdown rocket. Women must make a takeover power grab because men-who-would-be-boys are now bigger boys with bigger toys. The virtual realists invade us, and if Bill Gates isn't Big Brother, he is a distant subliminal cousin. We are being urged to transistorize our entire households with factoid basement kindergartens and empty high school attics that graduate students with comic strip diplomas.

When I was speaking at a local library last year, I saw that Bill Gates had signed the guest book. Under his name I wrote:

I don't do Windows.

How come this fuddy-duddy neo-Luddite reaction?

Aren't I supposed to be a true inhabitant of the future, born on Mars, flung from Saturn's rings, flying ahead of the saucers?

True. I am H.G. Wells' bastard son, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Which means I truly believe in a future, while the Internet people stay up late maundering and whimpering to morons in Moscow and lunatics in Louisiana. Today's electronic male is enmeshed with his genitalia, fighting for freedom to be lost on the Internet. Millions of calls per hour crisscross continents, sent and received by 42-year-old boy mechanics eager to trade vacuum tubes and dead transistors with similar boobs in Bangkok and Barcelona. Well, at least it keeps them out of harm's way, giving the grand chance for the women to seize power, while the giant kids' midlife frenzy broadcasts hot-air cartoon balloons pacing Telstar to land on fallow ground.

My response: Turn off everything. Patrol your house to pull the plugs on the TV, radio, fax, the e-mail-transmitting computer and its ingrown Internet. Go sit on your porch with a glass of vodka lemonade, a pad and pencil, and truly think.

To test my notion, plant me in a room with 200 chaps at 200 computers, give me a number two Ticonderoga pencil and a Mohawk Red Indian ten-cent pad, and I will outthink and out-create the whole damn bunch.

Some years back, addressing a virtual reality congress of special affects (that word misspelled to illustrate people who affect to be bright but are simply the fuse lighters for sky explosions that blow off emptily in winds), I cautioned them to get brain transplants.

Their creations having suffered triple bypasses away from the cerebrum to the groin or, perhaps worse, sheer emptiness, I pleaded for true information, not false shows. They were serving Chinese dinners--you were hungry an hour later!

No more vacuum-packed Jeopardy displays of nonfacts (Napoleon was born so-and-so, died thus and such) but who was he, what was he, why was he. Not dodo sums but biographical analysis and philosophy.

Think! Do you really want to be in lightning-strike instant contact with every Nellie, Ned and Noodge in the Universe? Do you wish e-mail by the bushel and ton or wish to send bags of boredom to friends innocently thinking they might get through the day without being struck senseless by your homespun gimcrack inspirations? Why not instead pierce two empty tin cans, insert 30 yards of twine, hold one can to your ear, give the other to a pal across the street so he can shout his revelations so loudly you don't need the can. Then do the reverse, as you did when you were a kid patrolling the neighborhood and waking neighbors with your yells.

Let William Faulkner be your guide. He was fired as postmaster in a Southern town because he didn't want to be at the beck and call of any s.o.b. with a two-cent stamp.

Pick up the phone. Give friends a chance not to answer. Use your car, go visit. But warn Aunt Nell or Cousin Billy Bob you're coming so they can chugalug the gin.

Computer games? Family competitions to prove that everyone's brains were left behind in their mother? Why not prove that in a single night you can move from nursery to kindergarten with aplomb?

Laptops as bedtime companions? Laptops cannot be cuddled like a babe in your arms. Laptops cannot bed down with you midnights with Madame Bovary or Long John Silver or Hamlet's father's ghost. Pour salt on the laptop batteries and watch them sizzle like snails. Get a life.

Call your cat to help you kill that laptop mouse.

(concluded on page 246) Cities on the Moon(continued from page 168)

Internet research? No! Step into a real library, swim in the aquarium of time, touch the books, open the books, smell the books, dog-ear the damned wondrous things with your canines. Wander the shadowed stacks, meet the Wizard and John Carter and Blind Pew coming the other way. Climb the stacks like an ape. Meet Verne on his way to the Moon, the first Sherpa on Everest, or Nemo. What's he doing up here at the Bottom of the Sea? Lug ten books home, with their scent of baking bread and their bright eyes and lively tongues.

•

Glancing back at the 20th century and promising that the 21st will be better, let's review some truths.

Since 1900, the automobile truly hit ground and, lo! the highways fused sea to shining sea. And with that invention, and the roads to cozen it, the slaves were freed. The cotton patches of the South were trampled by field hands in flight.

Without the invented car and its freedom gas, there would have been no Great Escape. Minus the sounds of distant occupations broadcast on crystal and heterodyne radios the bust-out north, east and west would have been stillborn. Moviehouse flickers showed what radios could not: far towns paved with gold, orange groves in which to hide the past, live for futures. Independence declared lay doggo until radio said, "Go! Get! Become!" Newsreels affirmed, and a promise of highways so fresh you left tiremarks in tar. The pre-World War I trickle became the hallelujah midcentury scramble.

For the grumpers who say let's remake the 20th century and do it right, let me list our virtues:

Dr. Salk's vaccine, which vanquished parents' dread when July arrived and children were crippled or killed by polio.

Destroyed en masse, all the other major diseases that decimated millions. Influenza, chicken pox, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, gone. Almost forever. TB has returned but will be gone again.

In counterbalance? AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea. But these will disappear by 2099.

Human beings will not, repeat not, be cloned in the new millennium. We already have twins. Who wants more?

All major American cities will be re-conceived, rebuilt. We know how and will do.

State capitals could well relocate on Iroquois, Havasupi and Algonquin casino reservations.

An Indian or Native American (your choice) will be president of the United States. Vice president will be a person of color whose ancestors stoked the Mississippi steamboats.

At long last, education will be arm-wrestled free of the Washington spoilers and pass into the creative hands of not yokels but locals.

As any half-bright student, mom or "Teach" knows, education is a hand-to-hand, in-your-face dialogue. Distant Washington elves and fairy horns do not drift downwind to waft over your typical schoolhouse, they are lost in static paper-snow blizzards. Education should not descend from the top but arise from the bottom. Its escalation will be given lift by inspired teachers, alert parents, and students who wander into class bearing unfamiliar books, destined to be read at Canaveral, Moonbase and New Chicago Mars. Quoting Admiral Byrd on his way to the South Pole: "Jules Verne leads me." Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and others born in space never to return will teach nonreaders how and why to read. Their premise: Live forever. The suddenly sit-upright student response: Yeah!

On a lesser level, consider that new-born vaudevillian: the videocassette. It will seize and dominate all future political campaigns. Realizing that the hourly bombardment of opinion is beyond funding, the various parties, right and left, will Mardi Gras a downslide of cassettes, light and dark, to flood our eyes and ears and tempt our blind paws to vote. The superb truth in dispensing video-cassettes is that you trade your untruths with your neighbor and watch his window to see if it's played, then borrow his spin to cook your TV set and twitch your surfing finger. These trumpet-and-bray tapes, distributed, will be el cheapo compared to cable or satellite charges. Best of all, the outraged truths of vapid politicos can be saved for generations and rerun late-nights to remind the sainted left and right that they are walking wounded. Hurling their crutches aside, they will try to protest their lies and be vote-tossed out the side exits.

In the midst of this, with a confederation of astronautical nations and the unlimited Universe above, the Greatest War will occur. The Third World War, actually, a war against space, time and eternity, a war of creation rather than destruction, at the end of which some few will have suffered, others died, but most prevailed to inhabit the air and populate alien worlds.

With a space station built on the good gray foundation ground of the Moon, we will send celebratory fireworks to at last landfall Mars, not to photo-scan but step-forth flesh-and-blood astronauts on the rim of that grand abyss, longer and wider than the U.S.A., and stare deep in its mirror to spy more futures.

In an essay published years ago, I described our destiny as we are the carpenters of an invisible cathedral, seen first with our intuition and then rocket-assembled in place. An architecture of belief in future life that speaks this motto:

Carpe diem, seize the day. But more: Witness and celebrate. We will ask ourselves why we were Earthborn in ignorance to lift our intelligence and outpace death. To what purpose?

An old question repeated like a celebratory prayer wheel. Why is mankind on Earth, faced with monkey puzzle genetics? The answer is this:

The Universe needs to be seen. It cannot exist without us. If we vanish, the Cosmos vanishes.

Our ego speaks a superb lie to urge us to persist, to conquer time and its melt-down of flesh.

Our souls cry thanks to the Universe, the Cosmos, the Godhead, for our birth and being. We need to prayerfully cry that thanks.

Space travel then is a Thanksgiving journey with a Vatican-Shinto-Muslim-Baptist choir to outpace Beethoven and shake the stars in their gyres.

We see, we know, we cry gratitudes and save the Universe from darkness by saving it with our sight, banking it in our souls and speaking it in tongues. We do not go gentle into that good night, we go raving with joy and will settle for nothing less than reciprocal gratitude from the Cosmos.

Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock puts it thusly:

Now lakes of liquid gold, Elysian scenesAnd crystal domes and angels in machines.

The angels and devils in machines will be us--on our way to Doomsday, or headlong for Heaven, and that Heaven's name is Moon, Mars and the Universe beyond, so small it nests in the human heart, so vast it explodes the human soul.

And by the end of the third millennium, what?

We will have footprinted the Moon, migrated to Mars, ricocheted off Saturn's rings to reach out and touch a hoped-for world circumnavigating Alpha Centauri.

We will do just that to seed the Universe with bad and good, hope and despair, carrying the memory of Hitler and the promise of Christ.

We defy old Shakespeare's cry that we are just sound and fury signifying nothing. Our sounding fury will signify something. A silent Universe speaks because we speak. A blind Universe sees because we see. An unknowing Universe knows because we know.

Who says? I say.

So you will say it, and your children's children's children.

We will outlive war and shout-claim the Universe.

And live forever, or a million years. Whichever comes first.