After America - Mark Steyn [17]
“Take hold of those metal knobs on the arms of your chair,” Lenina whispers to her date. “Otherwise you won’t get any of the feely effects.” He does so. The “scent organ” breathes musk; when the on-screen couple kiss with “stereoscopic lips,” the audience tingles. When they make out on the rug, every moviegoer can feel every hair of the bearskin.
In our time, we don’t even need to go to the theater. We can “feel” what it’s like to drive a car on a thrilling chase through a desert or lead a commando raid on a jungle compound without leaving our own bedrooms. We can photoshop ourselves into pictures with celebrities. We can have any permutation of men, women, and pre-operative transsexuals engaging in every sexual practice known to man or beast just three inches from our eyes: a customized 24-hour virtual circus of diverting games, showbiz gossip, and downloadable porn, a refuge from reality, and a gaudy “feely” playground for the plebs at a time when the regulators have made non-virtual reality a playground for regulators and no one else.
In the end, the computer age may presage not a reconceptualization of space but an abandonment of the very concept of time. According to Mushtaq Yufzai, the Taliban have a saying:
Americans have all the watches, but we’ve got all the time.14
Cute. If it’s not a Taliban proverb, it would make an excellent country song. It certainly distills the essence of the “clash of civilizations”: Islam is playing for tomorrow, whereas much of the West has, by any traditional indicator, given up on the future. We do not save, we do not produce, we do not reproduce, not in Europe, Canada, Vermont, or San Francisco. Instead, we seek new, faster ways to live in an eternal present, in an unending whirl of sensory distraction. Tocqueville’s prediction of the final stage of democracy prefigures the age of “social media”:
It hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back for ever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
THE HOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
Almost anyone who’s been exposed to western pop culture over the last half-century is familiar with the brutal image that closes Planet of the Apes: a loinclothed Charlton Heston falling to his knees as he comes face to face with a shattered Statue of Liberty poking out of the sand and realizes that the “planet of the apes” is, in fact, his own—or was. What more instantly recognizable shorthand for civilizational ruin? In the film Independence Day, Lady Liberty gets zapped by aliens. In Cloverfield, she’s decapitated by a giant monster. If you’re in the apocalyptic fantasy business, clobbering the statue in the harbor is de rigueur.
As far as I can ascertain, the earliest example of Liberty-toppling dates back to an edition of Life, and a story called “The Next Morning,” illustrated by a pen-and-ink drawing of a headless statue with the smoldering rubble of the city behind her. That was in 1887. The poor old girl had barely got off the boat from France and they couldn’t wait to blow her to kingdom come. Two years later, on the cover of J. A. Mitchell’s story The Last American , she still stands but the city around her has sunk into a watery grave as a Persian sailing ship navigates the ruins of a once mighty nation called Mehrika in the year 2951.
But liberty is not a statue, and that is not how liberty falls. So what about a different kind of dystopian future? Picture a land where the Statue of Liberty remains in the harbor, yet liberty itself has withered away. The word is still in use. Indeed, we may have a bright shiny array of new “liberties,” new freedoms—“free” health care, “free” college education. If you smash liberty in an instant—as the space aliens do in Independence Day—we can all have our Charlton Heston moment and fall to our knees wailing about the folly and stupidity of man. But when it happens incrementally, and apparently painlessly, free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty