The irony hasn’t escaped me: under the ancient marquee of Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily, in recent years I have been writing primarily about the past.
In particular this was brought home to me by an email I received from Jay Matson, poet, entrepreneur and a student several years ahead of me at Knox College. He signed it Captain Past. It seemed a more accurate moniker for what I was writing, as well as for the subjects of his recent poems.
Sometime around 2005 I adopted Captain Future as a screen name for my posts on Daily Kos and a few other similar sites, as well as in other contexts. I also began this blog around then. The purpose I had in mind for it was to highlight positive ideas and information for a better future—hence, dreaming up daily. Even when I got sucked into the morass of contemporary politics, the perspective was to see things as they affected the future. But I did get sucked in, railing against Bush, the Iraq war, torture, etc., then advocacy for Obama, then immediately unmasking Homemade Hitler in 2016.
Those posts, heartfelt and certainly justified, are the fodder of history, and as writing are painfully ephemeral. I did focus at appropriate times on major threats to the future, such as nuclear weapons and especially, primarily, the climate crisis. Occasionally I highlighted positive steps towards a better future, and certainly tried to articulate principles necessary for pursuing it. Some of these posts remain very relevant.
But I also continued to respond to the latest news, to people and events that quickly faded. And I did that, helplessly and stubbornly, for more than15 years, from the time that blogging was all the rage through the time that “nobody blogs anymore.”
At the same time, I was exploring aspects of the past, especially my own, in writing that mostly didn’t make it out of the computer. When I retired and turned attention towards writing projects on past and future, I discovered that my most natural form, and the way I could actually write something whole, was the kind of blog post that I had developed, solely on my own, over those years. That my blog readership dwindled over the years was somewhat depressing but in the end irrelevant. Writing these posts here and elsewhere, or essays or whatever they might be called, was its own reward.
For especially in the past few years I began to see, to feel acutely, that the world around me has changed so thoroughly that I mostly don’t have a place in it. Just about everything is significantly different. I can’t imagine how I would be making a living in this present. Then again, I can’t imagine how I even would have been able to go to college, or lived in the places I lived. Which leads me further back, to not even imagining how I could have been born at all.
Obviously, approaching my 77th birthday, I have many more days behind than in front of me. But in this more profound way, my life is almost entirely in the past. I’ve always felt somewhat alienated, as if I might be an alien. Now it’s pretty clear: I am definitely from another planet, the one that used to be here. (For one thing, it had more birds.)
Eventually I may be relegated to a very narrow present moment existence. But for now, I live powerfully in memory. Why do we have memories? They seem an extension of the first requirement of any creature: to know what is food and what is not. Anyone familiar with dogs or cats will understand how the first function—and perhaps the first step-- of memory is remembering where and when you find food, a vital skill for survival. So for me, in various ways, memory is related to sustenance.
What about that future I am supposedly captain of? In many ways, I cannot even conceive of an actual future anymore. AI in particular has me throwing up my hands. But in one essential way, the future is all too clear. Captain Future’s mission was to relentlessly persuade about the need and possibility of acting in the present to further a better future, and specifically to meet the challenge of the oncoming climate crisis.
I have been writing about the climate crisis since 1990. For the years I wrote about it on this blog, it was the quintessential elephant in the room (forgive me for using one of the many mindnumbing clichés that no longer have much power.) But today the climate crisis is no longer the elephant in the room. The climate crisis is the room.
The climate crisis is no longer avoidable: it is the present and will be the present for the imaginable future. A few data-driven experts who previously sounded alarms have recently moved the zeitgeist towards believing that the clean energy initiatives especially embodied in the Inflation Reduction Act will mean the United States at least will significantly lessen predicted levels of CO2 emissions in the near future, thereby preventing the worst case level of global heating. But even if that works out, it does not stop what is happening, and will happen for decades to come. The climate crisis is not “solved,” (whatever that means.)
Even if future heating remains below levels that UN climate scientists designate as catastrophic (and that itself seems unlikely), those levels are approximate and truly uncertain. Add to this the real world fact that when effects have differed from those predicted by climate models, they most have proven worse in reality than in what amounts to educated guesses.
These events, this suffering and death, this destruction, is going to get worse, year after year. (For instance, the World Meteorological Organization has just predicted a 98% chance that the next five years will be the hottest five years on record.) The financial and social costs of coping with them are eventually going to override denial and demand shocked attention. Eventually it may even happen that wars will be recognized for what most already are—climate wars. And the migrations that the wealthy countries are already unable to cope with in a civilized manner might even be recognized as directly or indirectly involving climate refugees.
The point isn’t that this is a doomsday scenario—the point is that it will eventually and inevitably be the context for everything in the future—including every individual decision on education and profession for the next generations, and eventually on where and how to live.
To meet the challenge of the global climate crisis required a level of maturity in humanity and its societies that once seemed possible, since it would not have required anything more than heeding those who have foretold the possibilities and the consequences. But it didn’t happen in enough time to prevent climate distortion, and now nobody really knows where things are going to end up. Again, this is the context for the work, the hopes and fears, and the lives of those who will live in this future, as it quickly becomes the present.
It’s possible to exaggerate how widespread this is in America, but the extremes are jolting. Guns of unprecedented destructiveness are a bigger part of US life than at any other time in its history, or was ever even imagined. The return of child labor makes the huge gulf between rich and borderline poor look like the early 19th century London of Dickens novels. Margaret Atwood’s Gilead society from The Handmaid’s Tale seems more possible than ever, only we’ll be calling it Florida. And so on. All this at at the precise time we can’t afford to go backwards, to make more trouble for ourselves. But that’s what we’re doing, and expending a lot of energy, resources, attention and social capital doing it, diverting it all from where it is truly needed. This makes us dangerously vulnerable and fragile as a society, as a civilization.
The climate crisis, the onrushing extinctions of other lifeforms, the unsustainable distance between the obscenely rich and everyone else—these are the meaningful vectors now creating any future context I can imagine. The addition of AI and other technological wonders only magnifies and exacerbates the chaos that also becomes the background if not the foreground of future life.
I may have observations on aspects of the present based on those perspectives, as well as more recollections (I hope to continue and even finish my History of My Reading series, which should go faster through the decades than it has so far.) I may finally get around to writing about words, another long-planned project.
I’ll still check the numbers of “readers,” though what’s officially counted may be mostly bots, and who knows who goes uncounted. Readers may encourage me, but the absence of readers will no more than temporarily discourage me. The words are what’s real, and somehow I can only abandon my pieces by publishing them. Though I still hope to explore other forms of publication (even as I suspect them of being just as dubious) I will likely continue publishing in this hapless form of the blog.
If I do it under this marquee, it’s because Captain Future is a product of the past. When I started using it as a screen name I actually had no idea that there were Captain Future stories, since they’d been written and largely forgotten in the 1940s. When I learned that the idea for Captain Future was the result of a visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the World of Tomorrow, that had always fascinated me (and which my mother visited), the link between past and future was made. In a sense, I am now such a link.
