In my boy days, we were always getting articles about how Jules Verne had predicted the future. This was a major theme in the world in those days: Jules Verne had predicted space travel, high-powered submarines, television, and who knows what all else. There was a reason that the government named its first nuclear submarine after the ship in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne, as a prophet, had Nostradamus beat all hollow.
Those days have slipped off to wherever the good times go. People began to speak of mistranslations of the French original for English-speaking audiences, and the natural reaction to years of articles about how great were Verne’s powers of prophecy was a growing flood of articles to explain what Jules Verne got WRONG. Our own mission to the moon, for example, did not involve a spaceship fired from a very large cannon. And in all of this, the sheer adventure of many of Jules Verne’s tales was lost under other societal considerations.
The newest prophet of futuristic achievement and technology, according to articles and videos I have run into, is Star Trek, especially The Original Series (TOS, as it is known to acronym lovers). The writers in the Sixties were just making stuff up to look like the future, but they were not stupid, and they benefited from Gene Roddenberry’s requirement that the shows was not going to stop the plot to explain how all these devices worked. This was considered a nice bit of polish in the day, but it did not really impact today’s culture until someone sat up during the umpteenth rerun of The Trouble With Tribbles and exclaimed, “Hey! Thise communicators are really flip phones!”
So Star Trek has gotten the Jules Verne treatment, having correctly, with some adjustments for changing styles, predicted the desktop computer, the big screen television, and 3-D printing.
I am not here to start the anti-Verne effect on Star Trek (that’s already begun). But I think I’ve spotted something no one else has. And it struck me while I was considering the postcard shown above.
“Peaceful Thanksgiving”: curious wish. We usually wish people a Happy or a Merry or a Nice. But how many cards wish you a peaceful holiday?
A lot, as it turns out. I found dozens of cards from around 1909 wishing people a Peaceful thanksgiving. I wondered if there were some particular crisis that led to this, but the answer was right there on the postcards. Because the ones with longer captions wished you a “peaceful amd prosperous” Thanksgiving. Several had poems which spelled it out explicitly: Thanksgiving was a day for celebrating plenty, but prosperity was not possible without peace. Peace and prosperity, to our ancestors, were something to wish for, and be thankful for, on Thanksgiving.
And my mind went to “Day of the Dove”, a Star Trek episode in which weird things happen which keep the crew busy with a small invasion of Klingons. Both sides are upset by this turn of events, and spend their time fighting and killing, though they find their fallen foes brought back to life for another round, as if something is profiting from all the violence. They eventually deduce that an outside force IS, in fact, causing the events to feed its needs through hatred and violence. So the bitter enemies get together to laugh the alien out of existence.
So hey, yeah: Star Trek got it right. Predicted social media, didn’t it? An entity which, realizing more hits mean more profit, has perfected a system which brings you articles or videos to upset you. I started noticing it myself during all the alarums and excursions of 2020, when I learned from a lot of my friends on Facebook that it was okay to hate people if they weren’t the same (fill in blank) as you. Everyone who responded with an angry answer got an angry reply, and the number of hits grew, and the alien entity grew stronger and stronger.
It’s an Election Year again this year. Shortly after Election Day, we will hold Thanksgiving. Not that laughing at this alien entity instead of howling with anger will solve the WHOLE problem, but….
Just saying. Have a Peaceful Thanksgiving. And prosper.
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