Showing posts with label 1980s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1980s. Show all posts

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Short SF Review #24: Perspectives

"Perspectives," by W.R. Thompson
Originally published in Analog, November 1983

 "You realize how dangerously tense things are up here, don't you?"
Bob looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that this is the most stress-filled environment in which humans have ever attempted to live."

 The 1980s were interesting times for science fiction. The gosh-wow-isn't-this-gadget-rad-as-heck stories and odes to pocket-protected engineers solving technical problems that had once dominated it were an increasingly smaller part of a larger galaxy. The Space Shuttle had begun to fly, and proved the 1970s dreams of two-week turnarounds and $10-per-pound orbital launch costs to be just that--dreams. The world was becoming more like science fiction every day, but to some science fiction writers, the world was always trying to take it away.

 A lot of those writers ended up placing stories in Analog, and as a result, many Analog stories in the '80s are built around space boosterism and reflect the anxieties of authors that, just as it had been possible to reach for space, their hands were being slapped away by "budgets" and "physics" and "U.S. Senator William Proxmire (D-WI)," about whom they complained mightily. Stories that come out of this zeitgeist often look rather... warped to modern eyes.

 W.R. Thompson's "Perceptions" is one of them. Set in the near future of 1983, so probably ten or fifteen years ago, the United States has set up a lunar colony as the core of a space mining operation. Buffetted and battered by its dependence on Earth and its politicians, a deep vein of uncertainty and stress is piled on to the ordinary concerns of space life--you know, that unless everything keeps working, everyone will die. Into this comes Charles Augustine Hacker, a psychologist sent up to study the effects of stress in the colonial environment. Makes sense, really; a lunar colony runs in completely different circumstances from anything on Earth, and you'd want to have an outside opinion on mission-critical things like psychological stability, for the same reason you'd want air traffic controllers or nuclear reactor technicians to be in good mental health.

 But he isn't 100% on board with the idea of space colonization, so in the world of a 1980s Analog story, he is of course the villain.

 Hacker has an argument behind him -- the colonists act weird to his eyes, beyond their general-but-understandable unwillingness to dwell on the hostility of their environment; they're as sober as a temperance convention, they're careful to a fault, they use jargon-filled slang that implies they'd rather think of themselves as machines. He also has a solution: for the colonists to return to Earth, before their society snaps. The colonial leaders, being the colonial leaders, don't think much of this solution, and when they discover where Hacker's coming from, they immediately make plans to resolve the situation to their benefit.
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 I'll admit that the execution of "Perceptions" may suffer from being, as best as I can tell, Thompson's first professional sale. I know that my first sale to Analog, back in 2012, doesn't match up to things I'm creating now. Still, readers can only engage it by how it was executed, and honestly, I still can't decide if the author *intended* the reader to look askance at the story or to take it at its word. When I first read it on the subway, I reached a point where I said to myself "oh, I see what's going on, all these expectations that're being set up are going to get toppled," right until I reached the last line and the tower of expectations stayed defiantly upright.

 The story is built around the colonists' realization that Hacker has an ideological axe to grind: specifically, that technological advancement had made civilization more and more stressful, that "technology has destabilized the foundations of life" and "form[s] dangers to life and limb which are beyond human comprehension." The leaders decide he lacks intellectual honesty because he filters things through his viewpoint rather than theirs, and come to the conclusion that abandoning the colony would end up dooming all of humanity to a new Dark Age. So, being calm, rational individuals who are in no way suffering from severe psychological pressure, they decide to give Hacker a nervous breakdown.

 Yeah.

 That's pretty much how it ends. The colony's director wonders how long it'll be until he can sleep soundly again, even though he's convinced himself that he's saved the colony -- and there's a lot of convincing going on in this story. The colonists convince themselves that they're totally okay, that Hacker is full of shit solely because he has a particular viewpoint, and that all of their actions are worthwhile and justifiable.

 The key thing that the story appears to gloss over, though? Hacker isn't wrong. The moon is far more hostile than any environment on Earth. Stress can be a real problem, and it can sneak up on you. "I don't feel any tension," says Bob Dubois, the colonial director, as if that settles things. But tension is funny like that, and it's something I can speak to. I've been working the same job for nine years now, but it's only fairly recently that the tension migraines started to appear, and even more recently that I discovered they were tension migraines. You can think you're calm, collected, and in control and be totally unaware that the dam holding back everything has started to buckle.

 I thought that this story would end by, in part, vindicating Hacker. Much of the story's middle is a dialogue between two characters justifying the colony's customs to each other, which I read as the characters trying to convince themselves that they were right, that nothing was wrong with them. There's never any self-awareness, never any doubt; the colonists know they are the Good Guys Here. It's like they're terrified to interrogate their own beliefs, in case they discover something they'd rather leave hidden.

 In their own way, the colonial leaders are no better than their villain -- but you could make an argument that they're worse. They barely bother seeing if Hacker can be swayed, with the doctor justifying the induced breakdown by saying that he can't be reasoned with. What's left unsaid is that, to all appearances, neither can they.

 "Perspectives," to me, is greater than the sum of its parts. It's not many stories that leave me thinking for days after I read it, wondering whether the author was pointing to this thing or that one.
what do you mean i haven't used this category for FOUR YEARS woooooow


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Friday, June 24, 2011

Short SF Review #18: Hackers

Hackers, by Rick Cook
Appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, April 1989

"All you were was a bunch of goddamn amateurs - hobbyists who kept building rockets and blowing them up, and building them and blowing them up, until one day you knew enough that the rockets didn't blow up anymore."

In retrospect - and I would welcome commentary from people who were actually around and involved at the time - it feels to me like there was a definite thing about space development in the late 1980s. Maybe it came about with the end of the Cold War, or perhaps that was just a convenient coincidence, but even now when I look back it really feels like 1989, say, was when we were supposed to start doing things in space in earnest. With the way things unfolded in reality, that's more likely to be 2019 or 2029... presuming that we can even afford it by then.

Considering the history of space exploration, particularly when one puts the grand plans next to the actual missions, it's no surprise that there's a strong undercurrent of alternate-historical "what might have been" speculation in the genre. Rick Cook's "Hackers" begins with this question and takes it in a direction that, even twenty-two years later, not many people have gone.

In "Hackers," we find ourselves under the sunny skies of Canaveral Field, where final preparations for 1989's Space Week are underway. This is where the rocket jockeys come together, from the San Antonio Rocket Club to the Los Angeles Space-Faring Society, with competitions as varied as a race around the moon and a mock rescue flight to one of the dozens of space stations orbiting Earth. In 1989.

Yeah, that's right. Because the 1989 of the nameless protagonist isn't the 1989 you and I lived through - it's a parallel universe, which split in the late 1950s when the Soviet Union failed to place Sputnik 1 into orbit. With the science of rocketry focused solely on ICBM development, and with no prevailing mood in the United States that the USSR was overtaking them, there was no space race. Governments didn't lay down billions toward getting men into orbit and, later, to the moon.

It was the amateurs that did that instead, as part of an entirely private space program - the moon was first visited not by the United States in 1969, but by the National Geographic Society in 1975... which actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. By 1989, spaceflight is routine, and everyone accepts the world for what it is - except Crazy Eddie, a man who always hangs out around the rocket meets and never seems too right in the head. When the protagonist and his copilot launch in their Delta Doll on a mock rescue to a space station run by the Boy Scouts, they discover that Crazy Eddie has stowed away on their flight, and that his presence may make the difference between success and disaster.

The biggest issue with this story is one that isn't the fault of the author, one that couldn't have been realistically predicted - it's just that between 1989 and 2011, the harsh light of reality shines on the pages now, and one just can't read the story in the same way. What happened? Copenhagen Suborbitals happened.

The HEAT-1X Tycho Brahe rocket in flight over the Baltic Sea on June 3, 2011. Photograph by Copenhagen Suborbitals.

I mentioned this story, without being able to remember minor details such as its title, a few weeks ago when I wrote about the successful launch of HEAT-1X Tycho Brahe, the first such success for a non-profit, amateur project - and it really throws it all into stark relief. To be brutally honest, now that reality has advanced to this point, it's become much harder to suspend my disbelief for the alternate 1989 - that given only thirty-two years of different development and based solely on private funds, you could have a world of private rockets and private space stations and a city on the moon with no government resources whatsoever.

Now that I think about it, in that respect, this is a particularly American story, quite possibly emblematic of the political ideals of the Reagan era. I'm sure there are plenty of small-governmentists and libertarians and Reaganauts and whatnot out there who would wholeheartedly agree with the idea that a space program that never had to deal with the government would have been more successful. While they may have a case for how things would go once the required foundations are in place, personally I'm skeptical as to whether a private space program would have got that far to begin with.

Would it have been possible for a SpaceX to start doing business in, say, 1982 rather than 2002? Or rather, would it have been possible for that pre-SpaceX to successfully do business? Whether the necessary foundations for a private space industry existed at that time is something I can only guess at. Sure, Copenhagen Suborbitals built their rocket for $50,000 and used such esoteric and advanced equipment as a hair dryer - but they built it with the technology of the 21st century, from the tools to the materials and the social networks that enabled people from all over the world to drop dollars in their hat. They also had the benefit of sixty years of NASA blazing the trail, discovering what worked and what didn't. Nevertheless, "Hackers" may work even better now for some people than it would have in 1989 - almost a wistful image of what we could have had if we were driven enough, determined enough, if we wanted it enough.

I have to say, though, the choice of title seems a bit strange. While I do get it that it's "Hackers" as in "hacked-together rockets," even in 1989 the term was becoming closely associated with computer hackers. But that's minor.

ANDREW'S RATING: 4/5

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Monday, June 6, 2011

Phototour: Times in Motion - Times in Touch

Twenty-five years ago, the world came to Vancouver, British Columbia. As the host city for the 1986 World Exposition - known universally as Expo 86 - fifty-four countries set up their pavilions and twenty-two million people visited between May 2 and October 13, 1986 to see the future of transportation and communication. Some of that future, in the form of the SkyTrain, is still with us today. Mostly, though, after Expo 86 ended little evidence of it remained; the Spirit Catcher was sent east to Barrie, the McBarge slowly rusted in Burrard Inlet, and the Plaza of Nations canopy was torn down for being unsafe.

Still, Expo 86 marked an important time in Vancouver's history. It was the city's centennial, and it was probably the highest-profile event that had taken place in the city at that point. It caught a city in transition from an industrial "end of the line," built on shipping and forestry, to the modern metropolis of 2011.

My grandfather, Les Parkinson, visited the Expo in June 1986 - and he brought his camera with him, very likely the same Hanimex 35SE that I carry around today. He didn't take many photos, but those that he did take reveal a city that is, to me, at once closely familiar and strangely different - and sometimes, just the same.

This past weekend, I took my digital camera and went to recreate the photos he took, to reveal the difference that a quarter of a century can make. The 1986 photos are on the left, and the 2011 photos are on the right, in case the differing image qualities don't tip you off.


Our first stop is the centre of the fair - maybe not geographically, but what we know today as Science World was originally Expo Centre, which housed a 500-seat OMNI/IMAX theatre, an interactive show in the Futures theatre, and the Design2000 future technology exhibit. Outwardly, it hasn't changed much in twenty-five years. The recreation of this photo is a best guess, based on the degree to which Science World's geodesic dome extends over the SkyTrain tracks; my modern photo was taken from Quebec and National.


Only a moment's walk brings us from the doors of Expo Centre to the shores of False Creek, but for a long while I wasn't able to identify the location of this photo as anything more than "somewhere along False Creek." The constant here is the glass building at the right of both photographs - in 1986 this was the British Columbia Pavilion, and today it's become the Edgewater Casino. To me, the most striking element of these photos is Yaletown: twenty-five years ago, that dense and booming neighborhood of shining towers existed as little more than factories and warehouses. If you're new to those streets in 2011, as I am, it's a bit hard to wrap your mind about how much the area has changed, and how rapidly.


Further along False Creek, my grandfather sought shelter from the rain beneath the Cambie Street Bridge - all I had to shelter from was the sun, so at least June weather has improved over that of twenty-five years ago - and took a photograph of some dragonboats on the water. From what I've read, those boats still exist, and are brought out for the annual races. Nor has the Fairview skyline changed radically since then.


Granville Island wasn't part of Expo 86 per se - the Expo lands didn't go any further west than the Granville Street Bridge - but even in 1986 it was a tourist attraction, and my grandfather seems to have spent at least a bit of time there. This first photo was taken near the Aquabus dock on the north side of the island, looking northeast toward the floating McDonald's restaurant and the Spirit Catcher. Today, if I hadn't had that support from the Granville Street Bridge as a constant, I would've had a far more difficult time identifying the spot; aside from the marina, it looks as if that part of the Expo lands has been entirely renewed over the intervening years.


These photos of the Granville Street Bridge were taken only a few steps away from the last ones, and it was this photo out of all of them that inspired me to take this project on; after I returned to Toronto from vacationing in Vancouver last year, I found when I was going through my archives that I'd recreated my grandfather's original photo without realizing it. The differences on the shore are stark - construction has hidden the Scotia Tower ramp to Howe Street from view, and none of the condo towers existed at all.


This is the last of the photos from Granville Island, and of all the photos I went to recreate in this project, this is my favorite - if only because it was the simplest to recreate. The presence of the Burrard Bridge and the Public Market took all of the uncertainty out of the equation; I'm fairly confident I was standing in the same spot my grandfather was twenty-five years ago. It was interesting to see the degree to which the West End, or at least the bit of it between the Burrard Bridge and Stanley Park, didn't change between these photos - or, for that matter, that lone green garbage can, which seems to have neither moved nor changed in all that time.


The relative stasis of the West End can be seen again in this photograph from Vanier Park in Kitsilano. Nevertheless, it does say a lot about the nature of West Vancouver's suburban growth up the mountain; it seems to my eyes that there's something like twice as much development now as there was then. The irritating thing about recreating this photo was that while I couldn't get to the exact spot where it had been taken from, it was perfectly obvious where that spot was - the big windows in the back of the Museum of Vancouver. That light pole is still there, but it's impossible to get that sort of perspective of it with your feet on the ground.


Vancouver has come a long way in twenty-five years. This view from the overlook in Queen Elizabeth Park reinforced this for me; amid the older, more traditional buildings like the Scotia Tower, Hotel Vancouver, and the Harbour Centre, a forest of new construction has shot up around them. This is likewise another photo I couldn't replicate precisely; from the angles, I suspect it was taken from the deck of Seasons in the Park, the restaurant next door.

Still, the last twenty-five years have not seen Vancouver change in every respect. There are still some things that are exactly as they were then, and which may well be just as they are today in 2036.

Things like giant enemy crabs.


Fun fact: that crab is more than just a sculpture. It is, in fact, a representation of the species that crewed the starship upon whose design the Museum of Vancouver was based - what, you think the building looks that way just because? The starship was, incidentally, shot down by the beam cannon in False Creek, which has since been disguised as the sculpture "Brush With Illumination" - because really, what better way to hide a titanically-powerful weapon capable of shooting down spaceships than as public art?

Second fun fact: I may have exaggerated the truth slightly.

A tad.

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Thursday, April 7, 2011

I Have An Incredible Deal For You

My brain is rather empty this morning, so I'm not going to fulminate on anything today. Rather, I thought I'd offer a bit of a reward for those of you who have been reading my wordpiles for as long as you have. It's another one of those things I came across in a box!

Yes, really, if you can believe it - $5 off on any Wardair flight! Don't you want to go to Winnipeg? West Palm Beach? Barbados? Well, here's your chance! Go for it!

Presuming, of course, that you also have some kind of time machine. By the time this coupon was a year expired, Wardair didn't exist - folded into Canadian Airlines, which itself no longer exists.
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Friday, April 1, 2011

Discovered: My Greatest Masterpiece!

Flash! While digging through directories of old material I'd scanned into my computer a while back, I came across something shining - something golden! A work of from one of the earliest points of my writing career - a poem that, even today, shakes the very foundations of the art! When I found it I was left breathless by the deftness of the work, the flow, the way just the right word is used at just the right time. Even my inability to spell my own name correctly, thus making a double-repeat necessary, makes it that much more spellbinding.

It's been off in a box for far too long. It's time that Andrew Barton's "Space" is shared with the world!

I like planets. I would like to visit Mars.
I like Saturn. I would like to visit the rings.
I would like to visit the Milky Way Galaxy.
I would like to visit the sun because I want to see how hot it is.
I would like to visit Uranus. I want to visit its rings.
I would like to see space from Earth.

Andrwb
Andrew
Andrew

Now, for seriousness: I'm not exactly sure what the motive behind this was. I'm pretty sure it was part of a school project, as this dates from way before I had a home computer; it wasn't dated, but based on the clues I've been able to gather - mostly the state of my handwriting - my guess is that it was made in approximately 1988, when I was five years old.

Someone needs to tell that kid to go outside at night and look up. Wouldn't you know it? It's space! From Earth! I get the impression that I meant "Earth from space," which would be a lot more appropriate.
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Friday, March 11, 2011

Photo: The Future of Ice Cream Delivery

Expo 86 was built around the themes of transportation and communication. From it, Vancouver got things like the SkyTrain, Canada Place, and McBarge - but there was more than that to the World's Fair. I know because my grandfather was there twenty-five years ago, and took pictures.

One of his pictures is, on the face of it, ordinary: it's an ice cream vendor. But this is an ice cream vendor in the context of transportation, communication, an dthe future - so it's not just some ordinary truck with a set of chime speakers on the roof. Hell no. This appears to be nothing less than a rocket-powered off-road ice cream delivery helicopter. I mean, just look at it! I haven't been able to find any information on it, though; if any Expo attendees can shed some light, that'd be pretty awesome.

If it truly wass representative of the future, I presume that it sold only Dippin' Dots.

I hereby release this work (by Les Parkinson, 1986) under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
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Monday, May 31, 2010

PDP #228: If You Have A Problem...

The A-Team was one of the landmarks of 1980s television. Do not deny it; in your heart, you know it to be true. From Hannibal's disguises and love of when the plan comes together to Mr. T and the once-an-episode assembly of armored fighting vehicles from backroom scrap, it may have been cheesy but it was still also awesome. I'm not sure whether or not the upcoming major motion picture will turn out like so many other 80s TV show reboots, but I'll be seeing it anyway.

I encountered this van while going home on Saturday via the Carlton streetcar. It's turning onto College Street from Manning, and the only thing it's missing from the true A-Team van is the spoiler at the back. But I won't quibble. Deep down, many people want to be able to hire the A-Team.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
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Tuesday, March 9, 2010

What I Have to Say About the Day

Yesterday, as you may or may not be aware, was International Women's Day. On Twitter, fellow Toronto mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson - who, incidentally, has a pretty kickin' logo on her Twitter page - put forward the question of how readers would recognize the day. It didn't take me all that long to figure out how I would. The most appropriate way for me, I think, is a recognition of everything my mother did for me; she's certainly the most influential woman in my life, and most likely the reason I tend to favor strong female protagonists in my writing and reading. Female Shepard is just the latest in a long list.

Andrew Barton, rockin' it in 1983

Take a look at that kid. What do you see? Aside from all the obvious aspects, what I see is potential - a life still at the starting line, capable of going in any direction, opportunity without limits. Depending on how things turned out and how events had shaped him, that kid could have been dead by now, or a millionaire, or in jail, or a man on the front lines - or even a rabid Montreal Expos fan until 2004, at which point he may have become a dispirited Nationals fan or just switched to the Blue Jays. That he ended up becoming a candidate for municipal office was likely one of the lower-probability results, but like I said, to me that photo represents opportunity without limits. But it's one's parents that can wield a disproportionate influence in the development of their children's outlook, and given the nature of my family life, my mother's influence was especially significant.

It's a difficult and stressful period in anyone's life. My parents were both younger than I am now when I was born - I have no idea how they managed it, and I doubt I would have been up to the same task at the equivalent point in my own life. My mother managed, and while I've always agreed that she raised me well, it wasn't until very recently that I figured out how to articulate the whys of it. Now I do.

Over this past weekend, I came across and read The Authoritarians by Robert Altemeyer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. The Authoritarians, freely accessible online, is a study of the nature of the right-wing authoritarian personality; a personality characterized by the combination of a submission to established authorities, a willingness to aggress against groups that are considered "enemies" of the established authorities, and a highly conventional outlook of society and social norms - this generally manifests in a desire to force everyone to conform with the same conventionalist viewpoint. Repent Amarillo, the "Texas Taliban" you may have heard about in the news recently, represents this well, and in fact is how I heard about The Authoritarians in the first place.

One of the aspects Altemeyer discusses is a theory of why people develop strongly right-wing authoritarian personalities in the first place. Not surprisingly, the manner in which parents raise their children figures prominently into the theory - particularly considering that, as Altemeyer tells us, "we do know that [high-scoring right-wing authoritarians] were raised by their parents to be afraid of others, because both the parents and their children tell us so... authoritarians' parents taught fear of homosexuals, radicals, atheists, and pornographers... about kidnappers, reckless drivers, bullies and drunks."

People who have these kind of personalities, according to the research that's been done so far, tend to have far deeper and nevertheless-overflowing reservoirs of fear in them than people like, say, me, who scored very low on the scale. "Anger... fear... aggression. The dark side of the Force are they," Yoda said, and he's right. Fear can make people commit desperate and negative acts, and someone raised in a climate of fear would understandably be more willing to commit acts of aggression in the service of the authorities that keep the objects of fear at bay. I can understand it intellectually. Nevertheless, when it really comes down to it that kind of upbringing is foreign to me... completely outside my experience, and thankfully so.

So, in the spirit of this International Women's Day, I want to thank my mother for raising me right, however she did it. For not looping a leash around my neck and yanking it back whenever I went off to explore or wonder. For not presenting a situation where the world consisted of a few good people ("Us") and a great, seething mass of others ("Them"). For letting me be with both eyes open, for letting me ask my questions and find my own solutions.

For letting me grow up, no matter how hard it must have been under the long shadows of fifty thousand nuclear weapons, in a world without monsters.
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Saturday, January 2, 2010

I Know What My Sin Is

Back in 2009, I wrote a post which detailed my disillusionment with the 21st century as it had unfolded up to that point, and looked at the end of the decade as a pessimistic counterweight to the 1990s and 1980s, both of which struck me as more optimistic times - although, being that I'm just 27, my knowledge of the '80s zeitgeist derives mostly from what was written and produced at the time.

Apparently I'm wrong. Noel Maurer left a comment taking me to task for projecting my own view onto the spirit of the times in the late '80s and early '90s, and while I take issue with his assertion that the early 1990s recession was worse than the one we're in now - I haven't been able, personally, to find anything that suggests our current economic malaise comes in second place to anything but the Great Depression - he's got a point.

I've also picked up a "declinist" vibe from some works of the period, but in the grand scheme I thought those were outliers. Things like 1991's Fallen Angels by Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn, which also reflects a general attitude towards climate change when it was still popularly considered only as the Greenhouse Effect, or James P. Hogan's 1992 The Multiplex Man, feed into the "end of the West" concept - and while Fallen Angels mires the entire world in radical technophobic ultra-environmentalism, The Multiplex Man goes one further and has the former Eastern Bloc become the new center of technological and economic growth. As for the hope of cold fusion as "one of the big game-changers," S.M. Stirling's 1989 short story "Roachstompers" - despite the other qualities which struck me as somewhat disturbing - looks at the negative consequences of the game being changed in such a big way.

So I was wrong about the nature of the time - but that got me thinking. My conception of the past was greatly colored by the attitudes of the works created during them. How, in twenty or thirty years, will the '00s be seen by those who haven't been born yet or are still too young to have any understanding of the decade?

Historical events, or the lack of them, may have something to do with that. Part of my conception of the late 1980s as an optimistic time came from the historical awareness there - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and in 1991 the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. From where I stand, it seemed as simple as "the threat of nuclear war that you've lived with for forty-five years is over! Why the hell wouldn't you idiots be optimistic?"

I can't think of any equivalent historical events for the '00s that would similarly mislead an observer in, say, 2029. Personally, when I sat back to think of positive historically-significant events of the last ten years, the only one I can think of that might qualify is the inauguration of Barack Obama. Even then, the nature of how the remainder of his term unfolds will color the perceptions of future observers. Until at least 2012, we'll only have speculation.

I would love for the things we worry about today, like deficits in democracy or environmental damage, to look as quaint in 2030 as 1990's fears of "crime and racial tension." Personally, I don't believe we have that luxury.
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