Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 72. Sunrise is 6:18 AM and sunset 7:32 PM for 13h 14m 11s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1916, Ernest Shackleton completes the rescue of all of his men stranded on Elephant Island in Antarctica.
Traditionalists in Whitewater, who want a return to the past, face two big problems.
First, when traditionalists call for a return to past conditions, one naturally asks: How did the present come to be so different from the past — under the traditionalists’ watch — that they want to go back to a now-defunct state of affairs?
Second, and even more difficult to answer: How do they propose to return to the past? For H.G. Wells in his novella and in a later film adaptation the answer was clear: build a time machine. (In the novella and the film, the time traveler uses his machine to go into the future, but traditionalists could use a machine of their own to go into the past.)
Easier said than done. In the film version of the story, it’s actor Rod Taylor who builds a time machine. That’s the same Rod Taylor who, in The Birds, convincingly played a man who formerly dated Suzanne Pleshette and presently dated Tippi Hedren. Whitewater’s traditionalists may be wonderful people, but there is simply no possibility that any of our local traditionalists have that kind of mojo. (A man who could convince you he dated those two extraordinary actresses could convince you he built a time machine. Indeed, he probably could have built one. Someone should also have asked him to build a fusion reactor or craft a plan to end world hunger.)
And yet, and yet… these men and women of Whitewater who yearn to restore the past have no machine in which to transport the city. They have, instead, only a project of forcing present-day residents into past roles (undesirable for many, and pleasant only for the traditionalists) or talking about doing so while producing nothing.
Those in local politics who would like to take the city back to an earlier time are wasting their energy (and everyone else’s) in politics. The retrograde and revanchist cravings that grip them cannot be satisfied through policymaking. A support group or a psychiatrist might help, but our present politics won’t, and can’t, fulfill their nostalgic yearnings.
Hurricane Idalia Makes Landfall in Florida as Category 3 Storm:
This reference to a time machine is funny, but this part is serious: “They have, instead, only a project of forcing present-day residents into past roles (undesirable for many, and pleasant only for the traditionalists.” 100% true. Too blind to think ahead.
Also they can’t take people back to another past voluntarily. But that doesn’t matter to them does it?
It’s about imposing conditions on people who don’t want those conditions. It is true that it’s impossible to go back. Thinking that you can does need a “support group or a psychiatrist” It is disturbed in a selfish way like a few people just want their past and can’t think about anyone else. Thanks guys but your past wasnt so good for lots of people.
Instead of making the future better they only repeat how great it supposedly was long ago.
The easiest position to take would be to say nothing should ever change, that the status quo should remain undisturbed forever. That’s not possible now, as people look around, so a faction says instead, ‘let’s go back.’ If the banker-landlord-public-relations men had done their work properly (by their own lights) there would be no need to go back. They didn’t do their work properly, however, even by their own standards of a generation ago.
And so, and so, they make the next easiest claim: they want to go back. They made a mess, and now they — the very men who made that mess — call for a return to the past.
The men who turned an imperfect past into an uncomfortable present now presume to guide the city back to an imagined past. Men who couldn’t manage time when they were younger now call for time travel.
They call for a return to the past because they can’t think creatively of the future.