THIS WILL BE THE PRESIDENCY OF BARACK OBAMA

Senator Barack Obama

A courageous and youthful man, senator of Illinois, is waving at a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Berlin, not far from the Brandenburger Tor, the stage of many events in history that mark our progress from fighting Kings and Emperors to a genuine global civilization.


Berlin July 24, 2008

I believe this picture will be the key message of his presidency.: the message of unity and reconciliation. “We can not afford to be divided,” he said. And right he is, of course.

Reconciliation will no doubt be a strong theme in Obama’s (possible) presidency, bridging the many divides which hamper the preservation – and the continuity – of even some of the most primary conditions of our life on Earth. Well indeed, we are still at some distance of this shining prospect of a unified global community.


Obama with French President Sarkozy

Obama has been photographed with many important leaders of the world in Europe and the Middle East. They have allowed this even though the Democratic party still has to officially nominate him as their candidate. He has taken away every opportunity from McCain to do likewise and shake some leadership hands too. McCain knows that any such attempt would still ignite just a shadow of the attention that was given to Obama.

When he speaks he commands attention from the beginning to the end. Obama has grasped the sentences of the future to become his own in way that is reminiscent not only of a number of past presidents, but also of other leaders such as Martin Luther King. In Berlin he spoke in his capacity of American citizen, which only emphasizes his achievement, indeed as a citizen, and as a Senator, to attract such huge crowds well before he has does anything remarkable to history itself.

Well before the final presidential campaign Obama has alreadyrisen to stardom. He consistently performs at a level of high expectations. It is what makes him highly vulnerable at the same time. Everybody realizes that. But the sense of hope that he has managed to mobilize and help demonstrate, this time in front of a huge crowd in Europe, is something that, I hope, an increasing number of people in the United States will not want to relinquish just like that.

Our minds will crisscross the world in infinite variety

Connecting in the new virtual world of Second Life

Joining the new age of mass connection

The telephone is a nearly extinct species in our new age of communication. It is now a residual component of a complex of functions to which we get ourselves connected. The education of us, slaves of new toys of communication, is abysmal. I-Pods and I-Phones are thrown at us like meat is thrown to the lions of the Coliseum. Those who run fast will most enjoy it.

I will absolutely buy an I-Phone, but I have not yet decided when. First, the price was prohibitive. Now there is a second version, better and much cheaper. So I decided to have a closer look at the I-Phone. Then someone said: the touch screen system is hopeless if you need to dial phone numbers.

I hesitate. It is inevitable that I take a closer look at the options, before making a move. In doing so I need to establish more precisely what needs I have, too.

I have concluded that over the past years my needs have evolved.



I need to increase my internet mobility. I do not want any third party dependence where it concerns my access to the internet, anytime and anywhere;

I also want to fully personalize – and centralize - my telephone access (by having just one telephone number);

I need a far greater mobile document retrieval or file storage facility than I have now. Each time I want to use or share a document I need to mail it to my various mail-accounts;

It makes sense to centralize my incoming and outgoing e-mail but also better organize and - partly - archive it.

But otherwise it is about communication, at least this is the case in my own life. Some 70 – 80 % of my present social life is conducted or supported by the internet (MSN, e-mail) and mobile telecommunication.



I want to be connected anytime and everywhere. It should be simple – i.e. easy to access and to handle – and it should be reliable. Also, I want to read, write and publish regardless of my location.

I believe we can all make such or similar assessment of our needs. This is particularly relevant at a time when new devices and new functions are being marketed in rapid succession. Indeed, if we do not wish to simply become docile consumers and allow our entire lives to become almost entirely directed by software programmers and telecommunication companies, then we should become pro-active users, on top of our own business and lifestyle. We should co-create the industry that serves us and not let it dominate us.

Ultimately every individual will become permanently connected. We may from time to time switch off, for instance when we sleep or when we are in a theatre or private party. Otherwise people will become a kind of internet or telecommunication device of their own, with many functions imbedded in our cloths or in just one slick rectangular device that does it all for us with a mere touch or sound of our voice (well, something like the I-Phone).

We will create our own permanent personal connection with the rest of the world and communicate, share, create and publish whatever we wish to share with others at smaller and larger scales.

I believe that this far from a prophetic view, for I do not describe anything impossible today. Most likely I am just re-iterating what is already in the instructions of existing devices, such as the I-Phone or other mobile communication facilities.



But the challenge is to turn those possibilities into their effective use. Across the board our world’s available technology far exceeds the grasp of it among the large majority of its consumers.

Our technology has become as incomprehensible for the average person as are the mechanisms of nature that sustain the cycle of life. Human technology is the third evolution of life itself [1].

If we wish to be connected as a human being, or as a business man, to the networks world wide of other human beings and business men, we should do so with a great clarity of mind as to what it is that we take out of it and perhaps most of all: what we want to put into it. We should create the proper identity (or even: identities) to maximize the benefits of being connected.

I am always there, from wherever you are, unless I am asleep.


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[1] ) The first evolution is of all physical nature and its laws. The second is the mechanism of life as we know it on Earth (Carbohydrate based self-replicating process).

The future of American Royalty

About the Grand-Dukes and princesses of the United States

Uncle Edward Kennedy and his niece, the crown princess Carolyn of the United States of America came in the news briefly after one another. Edward Kennedy underwent a very serious brain surgery, and Carolyn Kennedy became visible as one of three top-advisers appointed by Obama to help him find a suitable candidate for the vice-presidency. A remarkable fact in itself.


One step removed from becoming Obama's running mate - Carolyn Kennedy

But then I was thinking. Will they remain unique, the Kennedys? Or is there the prospect of a lasting American Royalty, a true American nobility in the classical sense, with young lady Chelsea Clinton to follow - and so on? One could also think of the ‘royalty’ of Hollywood, of which quite a few members combine movie work with political activism, up to and including the governorship of California. The memory of Ronald Reagan can still stand out as their great example.


Next in line for the Clinton's - their daughter Chelsea

And even without using the comparison with old age or “ancien regime” distinctions of royalty and nobility, on can still ask the question: what exactly is the nature and identity of the – present – American elite?

I am posing this question, one could say, for a very personal reason too. For I have been brought up with an absolute certainty about the nature and identity of the American elite as it existed some thirty to forty years ago.

I could not have had a better example of American history and civilization then the person of my American grandmother, who also had the name of Carolyn. At old age she would be greeted everywhere by everybody as if she were a grand old queen.


The Pilgrim Fathers arriving at Plymouth, MA, 1620 - the birthplace of the early New England elite

However, my grandmother was all but royal. She was brought up, in the 1890s and early 1900s, with a total disgust for hereditary nonsense and with a great sense of republicanism. She was the daughter of a long line of Americans, starting at the very beginning, on the shores of New England. In 1620 one of her forebears landed near Cape Cod with the company of the ship “The Mayflower”, who later became known as The Pilgrim Fathers. “We have Mayflower blue blood”, my father often said jokingly. Nonsense, of course. Over a million people - if not more - can trace their origins back to the ealry settlers of America.

The Bush dynasty (lasting or only temporary?) - George W.'s daughter Jenna at her marriage

One of my grandmother’s great-great-great-grand-mothers was hanged in Boston – around 1660 - for speaking up her mind about the rigid theocracy of New England’s Governor Winthrop. Her name was Mary Dyer, and her statue can still be seen in Boston. She left some six children and a husband.

The principle of self-government and of the irrelevance of religion in public life thus became the very foundation of my grandmother’s American upbringing before she arrived in Holland in 1920, aged 30 (where she would live as a grand lady of Amsterdam for all her remaining 65 years).

But when I sense the current sentiments and ‘trends’ in the United States, I can see that the present elite is quite different from the ‘pure’ New England and US elite of the 1890s and early 1900s as I remember it. Indeed Hollywood today is very much at the forefront, as are politicians who have Hollywood qualities. For my grandmother, only true merits, not the cosmetics, counted. Yet she also had the sense of the imaginative, and of experimentation. My memory of her generation and the aristocracy she represented is of great dedication, achievement and joy, but otherwise filled with no-nonsense and good common sense.

This is I always have perceived the United States and the character of the American elite. But I am afraid I am talking about an American sentiment that is now almost entirely extinct.


Hollywood royalty - Jennifer Lopez

Still there is air of a US royalty or nobility, often influenced – of course – by greater or lesser financial success, etcetera. – but – as in the case of the Kennedys – dynastic projections play a role too. It would truly be interesting to have a peek in the future of this family. And yes, perhaps even of Chelsea Clinton.

The most intriguing royalty at present, I believe, is the Princess of Massachusetts, Edward’s most likely successor, his niece Carolyn Kennedy. Obama has drawn her in just one step away from becoming his true running mate. If this is not a flirtation with royalty and succession in a classical sense! I am convinced that Obama is well aware of the pro’s and con’s of this ‘picture’.

The forthcoming Presidential election increasingly becomes one which draws us closer to a new historic watershed. But what and when it will be, we can not foretell at present. Perhaps not in another four years. And perhaps the moment is imminent.

The greatest challenge for the Presidential campaign

It may have been important for the electorate of the primaries to see the difference(s) between the shrinking number of remaining presidential candidates. I think there remains very little room for doubt as regards the differences between the last remaining two candidates. In almost all respects they are each other’s opposite.

In almost every respect the future will be progressively colored by the man who finally will emerge as the winner of this election.

Yet, at this stage, the differences are not what really matters. They are clear and everybody can make their own assessment of them. No further campaign to stress the many opposing views will be necessary.


Barack Obama

What seems paramount though is which of the two candidates can best be expected to create a bridge or create many bridges across the divides both inside America and in the international world. Not the difference, but achievement of consensus and reconciliation would be the greatest potential contribution of the next American President.



John McCain

Ironically, this is probably the only quality in which the candidates seem highly compatible. Both McCain and Obama are men of balanced nature. Both project a sense of reconciliation, each from his own vintage point.

Reconciliation is not just a point on the agenda of the President once he is in office. In my view, it will indeed be the candidate who already starts this process of crossing bridges during the campaign, who will win the Presidency.

Will us await a – final - US Empire?

The history of Rome most certainly can serve as the precedent most close to the origins and development of the ‘Washington Republic’, the United States of America.

In Europe, by and large, the Imperial stage preceded the Republican. In Rome it was the other way around. The Roman Empire succeeded the Roman Republic.

The Presidency of George W. Bush has brought the world closer to the image of a US Empire than any presidency before him. It is not simply by the present day US actions in many parts of world that one could reach such a verdict, but by the authoritarian way in which the policies have been conducted: with the greatest disinterest in the opinion of right minded people, and forgetting the most basic rules of a democracy.


America's great monument of Republicanism

What we should not forget, of course, is that the United States were born out of great disgust for imperial and uncompromising attitudes of the King of England and the whole system that he headed. And it is democracy and republicanism that the US tries to sell to (or enforce on) the rest of the world, not mere military authority - or so it is officially said.

But we could also ask the question whether the US should be some kind of exclusive inheritor of the Roman mantle in the first place. The US can not exist without Europe the way it is, and for Europe this is similarly true in respect of America.

Washington, Paris, Berlin, even Rome itself, all share in the legacy, one might argue.

Europe obviously has no interest in US Imperial tendencies. Far from it. But we have been very unwilling or incapable so far to offer our own alternative to a world driven into new imperialism. The project Europe is a project exactly against that.


The multi-faced leadership of Europe

I believe at this point many in Europe would interrupt, and say: but why do you think that the US isn’t an imperial state already, particularly if you include the mechanism of free markets of which the US are masters, if not the Master?

Of course we could seduce the American people into electing a new President who is most amenable to European interests. What could we – I mean Europe - promise the American people in return? In particular: what could we promise them as a solid alternative to protracting the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters? It is impossible to think of solid solutions if the US and Europe are not in it together, and leveling. This process of itself would also countervail tendencies towards imperialism within the US.


A great innovator of the world's popular music, Elvis Presley

Could the US, like the Romans in their time, say that they are the first great nation of its kind ever, even without political and military imperialism?

The US have become accustomed in the past century to accept all the attributes of a world leader, not just in political terms, but also in terms of innovation and cultural development. We only need to contemplate the figures of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Louis Armstrong, and so many others to illustrate this point.


The US President who first took America across the bridge of world leadership

I have myself been raised with the great American example being omnipresent in my parents’ home, with our grandparents and with our relatives in the US. This is the US of which I am personally proud. And I certainly recognize the great influence of American inventiveness on our daily lives, everywhere in the world. In the movies we watch, in the mobile phones and laptops we use, in almost every aspect of our material and cultural world.


The instrument that has made the millions of us connect to the world, almost 24/7

But I can no longer be proud of a United States of America that leads the world on the basis of lies and pure self-interest. “Those who are not with me are against me!” Remember? One could say that these words were a blow to democracy, but perhaps even to genuine Republicanism itself. You always take a vote. You always listen to arguments.

But President George W. Bush refused to do so, and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair went on his knees for the President despite this. As the saying goes, Roosevelt and Churchill would have turned around in their graves.


The wrong single face of Europe?

There is one thing which most likely distinguishes the United States from the Roman world. There is always hope for the better. And there have always been leaders, at the right time, to help the Americans cross that bridge.

Are we at the verge of such a transition of leadership? I am careful not to be too hopeful in this respect. I wouldn't like another disappointment, such as in 2000 and again in 2004. Perhaps we should still bide our time for another four years and endure protracted opportunism and discontent, driven not by the people, or their representatives, but by the directors of America’s big multinational corporations. For if anything imperial can still arise, especially out of the US, it is not the Presidency, it is Corporatism (not dissimilar to the struggle within ourselves: between the consumer and the citizen).

Perhaps to regain control over corporations and their standards across the world, is one of the greatest challenges of the next US President. If may be preferable, actually, if a Republican does that job, not a Democrat. But in terms of public leadership it is very much possible that the immediate, strongest prospect is offered at the latter's side of America’s political fence.

Perhaps the lesson is that, whether or not the history of Rome has anything to say to the present American world, nothing that we hold self-evident today, is necessarily self-evident tomorrow. History can ebb and flow in many different, unsuspected ways. But that the decision of the American people in the forthcoming five months is a very crucial decision too for a great many people across the world and the course of this new century.

The origins and future of Christian Europe

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914 – 2003)

Today, I walked through my library and I picked out Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The rise of Christian Europe (Published in1965). His introduction to the subject reads like watching the best movie of history ever made. Or rather: like a history movie that has not yet been made.

Through his tale we can sense the physiology of our civilization, its breath and life’s rhythms, as they developed in their earliest ages, some time after the decline and fall of Rome.

But our history also arose out if it, out of Rome and out of all the forces that threatened it, Barbarians, Germanics, Gauls, Visigoths, Arabs, Huns, and so on. The Mongols! Whatever constitutes ‘Europe’ – it has emerged out of all that seemingly chaotic rubble of the Dark Ages.

"The end of Antiquity, that is one great problem which I shall have to consider in these pages. Its effect was enormous: it is one of the great discontinuities of history. It was the end of a whole world, a world which till then had been continuous for over a thousand years."

In great clarity and depth Trevor-Roper depicts the ascent of Europe out of the succession of kings and queens in many places, and the necessary historic process flowing out of them - and out to them. It is out of this that our sense of time and our sense of civilization have emerged.

The book carries on to “…speak of certain episodes periods of history which, in my opinion, represent or illustrate the great turning-points in that remarkable process: the rise of Europe from its eclipse, from the total abasement which followed the fall of the Western Empire of Rome, to the position of strength from which, in the twentieth century, it set forward to dominate the world.”



Europe is our history
Our history is Europe

When Europe fails, our history ends. Even the United States will have a different history only because of Europe (*).

We could ask – in the mean time – whether we are still a Christian Europe. From a purely historic perspective this seems almost undeniable. A Europe that is not essentially Christian will be a new and different Europe in the eyes of history. Different from the one we have known over the past fifteen hundred years.

So we have to be aware that in shedding the primacy of Christianity, as some propose in order to safeguard equality for all religions, and in making our culture essentially secular, we are creating a fundamental threshold in history. What Europe does that constitute? Is there a future Europe in which indeed all religions can live peacefully together?





Going back to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s masterpiece which breathes the origins of our civilization, our constant succession of rapid change and slow stagnation or decline. It is the breath of civilization on which we still live and will continue to live -from rapid change to slow stagnation or decline. And up again.

Where do we wish to be, and where do we think we are?

The essence of history is its unpredictability. The same applies to the future - by definition! -. We have no idea where we are. Only history will tell.



For Trevor-Roper, the major themes of early modern Europe were those of intellectual vitality, religious quarrels and of divergence between Protestant and Catholic states, the latter being outpaced by the former economically, politically and constitutionally. European expansion overseas was incidental to these processes. In Trevor-Roper's view, the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries were part of the reaction against growing doctrinal pluralism, and were ultimately traced back to the conflict between the rational worldview of Erasmus and other humanists, and the spiritual values of the Reformation. (**)

We are not void of spiritual aspirations. But we can not call ourselves outright intellectually vital these days. Ignorance is more abundant than – say – forty years ago, or so it seems. We live in a tremendously creative time of history, and I have no doubt we will at least be long remembered for our creative legacy, our movies and cartoons, our technology.

But this is not sufficient for a civilization to be on any way up. The beautiful toys we master conceal the human misery we fail to solve.

In this sense we should look at Europe as a potential failure as long as the misery of much of the other life on Earth is not resolved.. Africa, environment, climate, clean water supply, etcetera. Even the Romans understood that civilization requires the ongoing and unlimited flow of clean water.

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(*) One could argue that Washington is our true inheritor of the mantel of Rome, not Paris or Berlin, or London, or even Rome itself.
(**) Source: Wikipedia

FUTURISM

Not (yet) built: a vision of the future

It would be fascinating to compile a collection of images of the future as they have been created by people throughout the ages. What is the earliest (remaining) expression of ‘future’ that could be at the heart of such a collection?

In some respects the Egyptian pyramids are a reflection of a people’s futurism: for they were built to cater for the afterlife – which essentially is a kind of future for the deceased.

But even though the afterlife may be the eternal future for all of us, I was rather thinking of our fantasies of an imagined, future living world. It would be interesting to establish when exactly mankind started to produce them with the explicit intention of picturing a time beyond their own. In words or in paintings, sculptures – and other architecture than pyramids.

Perhaps architecture indeed is the profession which first took hold of the future in substantive images. Architects were the first great designers and planners. They had to see far ahead. Their whole existence was driven by their vision of some future.





An example of a jump into the future
The old and the new City Hall (now royal Palace) of Amsterdam, 17th century
(Depicting a tower on the New Church that was never built)

But if we focus at the phenomenon of the future, for instance as it is frequently envisaged in our contemporary science fiction: is this kind of fascination with future a pure product of our own time and culture and was, for instance, Jules Verne the first real pioneer in the respect?

Moviemaking and futurism perhaps have been part and parcel of each other from the moment of the conception of the cinema. One of the first real movies was about sending a rocket to the moon, and arriving there. Jules Verne had been its story’s originator.

So, the issue is: what is the history of futurism (not: futurology!) and how can this history best be demonstrated?

It may be true, as some literature on this subject contends (see sources below), that substantive futurist inspiration came with the Age of Enlightenment and Industrialization. This development must indeed have pushed the fantasies of the human mind a giant leap further. Suddenly the world seemed much more ‘engineer-able’. One can readily see that. And again, designers and builders most likely were the most powerful driving forces behind the development of futurist imagery. Perhaps even more for what was not built – at the time – than for the buildings and constructions that ultimately were accepted or approved. This idea is not new. Not long ago a book was published in the Netherlands, called “Never built in Holland”, containing an extensive catalogue of concepts and designs for public buildings which never left the drawing table. Most of these designs, even by hindsight, seem far out of step with the architecture of their own time, many of them being either a gross exaggeration of contemporary styles and fashion, or too visionary. But this, in many ways, is the essence of any ‘futurism’.


Futurism of the nineteen fifties: contemporary trends exaggerated



Futurist painting
This painting of the "Dynamism of a Cyclist" 1913 by Umberto Boccionidemonstrates the Futurist interest in film. Borrowing from Cubism, the Futurists were interested in the dynamics of speed and the simultaneity of the image in motion. Boccioni also created sculptures, which attempted to free the object from its traditional status, creating instead, a fluid medium infused by technology and raw energy.

In another way the subject is about the development and history of human imagination. Its focus over time, from the heavenly to the hellish. From inner space to outer space. Eventually it reached the whole concept of space and time itself. Einstein became the godfather of futurism when science and fiction merged. Without Einstein we would not have created StarTrek in much the same way. Without Einstein we wouldn’t have been fiddling with all the contradictions he revealed about space and time and the (im)possibilities to play with them.

And – one could say: as a kind of (gruesome) intermission between Einstein and our modern world - futurism could also be nourished as a great jump back in the past: witness of this fascination are the designs of Albert Speer for Hitler’s new Berlin, reminiscent of ancient Rome.


Albert Speer’s futurist Berlin of the nineteen thirties

This period was followed by the marriage between moviemaking and space travel. The Apollo 11 mission to the Moon drew many of its concepts from Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey.

In our recent time the greatest marriage is between moviemaking and the pioneers of the information age. No doubt, hundred years hence, our representations of ‘the future’ again will be unmasked as mere exaggerations of trends and fashions already in existence in our own time.


Futurism in the movies
(Minority Report)

I am member of a generation for which ‘change’ and ‘progressiveness’ have been the key obsessions. Our entire sense of progressiveness depends on an active imagination of an unknowable future. We cannot accept stagnation in any dimension. The future holds the sum total of all our current dreams. When we grew up ‘the year 2000’ was magic. It seemed far away and in our minds it was filled with the outmost modernity. And when this magic year came, on the early morning of January 1st, the most remarkable feature of ‘2000’ was that in fact so much had not changed. We didn’t fly in private helicopters, we didn’t transport ourselves to other planets in a whiz, and yes, there were many more huge skyscrapers and large scale traffic networks than – say – thirty or forty years before, but large segments of our countryside had remained unaffected. One could still look at cows grazing in a meadow and at cyclists waiting for a red traffic light.

Indeed, the greatest challenge for any futurist image is its depiction of continuity, of things unchanged. Mankind has already proven its power of imagination and innovation far in excess of immediate possibilities. The idea of ‘future’ inspires gifted visionaries to come with bold breakthroughs for instance in construction, consumer appliances or culture where the average human being would stop at slight improvements only. But to think of aspects, material or otherwise, of our environment and life styles that will not substantially change may well require a similar imaginative talent. In a way, this is exactly what we wish to express when we declare our monuments. It is unthinkable that humanity would ever deliberately tear down the pyramids or destruct the paintings of Rembrandt. In any credible depiction of the future they should be a fixed element.

Futurism is not about senseless dreaming. Mankind is making a progressively larger and more lasting impact over a longer period. Depicting these implications in far reaching futurist images or concepts can be seen as a serious effort to visualize – and integrate – them in a comprehensive concept of the future. One could see this as a ‘scientific’ process but I would consider it not less an artistic one. In this effort we can learn from the futurist images and concepts of the past. Its exhibition therefore would not only serve our curiosity for its own sake. It would equally help us guiding our actions between the fixed and the flexible in every dimension of the heritage we will finally leave behind.

SOURCES

Idea about the future : a history of futurism, 1794-1982.
by Burnham P. Beckwith

Women Artists of Italian Futurism: Almost Lost to History. - Review -
book reviewsArt Journal, Fall, 1998 by Deborah Johnson
http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/futurism.htm

The Futurism Collection , University of Delaware 1909 - 1969

Revelation, Futurism, and Dispensationalism
By Glenn Weiser
http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/Endtimes.htm