The Electron Pencil

(With apologies to the people at The Onion.)

Well, whaddya know? We’re now a full one-quarter of the way through the 21st century. Hah! I remember thinking about the coming century when I was a little kid. I even worked out how old I’d be when we’d hit the year 2000. At the time, I thought 44 years old was ancient.

Now, of course, I see 44-year-olds as punk kids.

Just like pretty much every other imaginative, The Day the Earth Stood Still-loving borderline juvenile delinquent, I was expecting moon colonies, personal jet-packs, mass transit helicopters zipping through the skies, and really cool silver clothing.

The 21st Century.

Back in my own callow youth-ness, I figured 2000’d be the first year of the new century/millennium. Now, natch, I’m more persnickety (more anal?) and will argue that it was actually 2001 that kicked off this epoch. Ergo, we’ve been 21st century-ites for 25 years now.

Think back to the first quarter of the 20th century. For pity’s sake, those alive then had witnessed a world war (the first of two — sheesh!) that killed about 20 million people, the invention of the airplane, the crazy-wild spread of cars, and the very advent of radio and telephones. They saw the development of tanks (for warfare) and the aerial bombing of civilians. Their world turned modern, seemingly in the snap of a finger, with the invention of the escalator, the safety razor, the vacuum cleaner, the air conditioner, the neon light, Corn Flakes™, Bakelite™, Cellophane™, the assembly line, the crossword puzzle, the bra, stainless steel, the toaster, the Band-Aid™, the robot, frozen food, and television. Einstein even modernized our view of the universe.

What have we seen during this past quartile?

I got to thinking about all this when, yesterday, I received the latest edition of Nate Silver’s “Silver Bulletin” newsletter. Silver’s the stats and probabilities geek who made a huge name for himself predicting (and every once in a while mis-predicting) elections. His latest missive is titled “The 51 Biggest American Political Moments of the 21st Century.” Without looking, I immediately thought the three tops would be the election of Barack Obama, the rise of Donald Trump, and the 9/11 attacks with their resultant wars and oppressive, paranoiac legislation.

Honestly, don’t these three phenomena rank among the very biggest political moments in our entire history? Surely they’re as weighty as Marbury v. Madison, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the decision by Roosevelt to supply Great Britain and the USSR with war materials long before the rest of the country came to the realization we’d be fighting for our lives against the Axis?

I’d love to say the Li’l Duce presidencies will be fleeting footnotes in our history, but they won’t. His dismantling of the New Deal/Great Society state is as earth-shaking as the institution of either of those human-centric efforts. Future historians will say FDR was the great visionary, he and LBJ the great implementors, and Caligu-lite the snotty brat who tore the whole thing down.

So, let’s see what Silver thinks are the top political moments of our no-longer new century. Here’s his Top 10:

• 10: November 3, 2020 — Joe Biden elected president.
• 9: November 5, 2024: Donald Trump wins election for a non-consecutive term.
• 8: September 15, 2008 —Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.
• 7: March 13, 2020 — Biden declares COVID a national emergency.
• 6: March 20, 2003 — US invades Iraq.
• 5: November 4, 2008 — Barack Obama elected president.
• 4: November 7, 2000 — Florida recount after no winner declared between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
• 3: December 12, 2000 — Bush v. Gore.
• 2: September 11, 2001: 9/11 attacks.
• 1: November 8, 2016: Trump wins presidency.

By the way, I wouldn’t figure a numbers monkey like Silver not recognizing that decades, centuries, and millennia begin on the ’01 year, not the ’00 one. Whatever.

Anyway, a number of Silver’s items are so related they should be consolidated. And, yeah, the Florida election fiasco and Bush v. Gore indeed were monumental. Especially since the Democrats chickened out of pressing the issue to the max. It was at that moment the party set its course in the coming century/millennium as a weak, ineffective, sobbing, whining, finger-wagging bunch of sophomore dorm pretend radicals. Maybe one day the party of my youth and tradition will rise again. It may even be this coming fall. But I ain’t holdin’ my breath.

So much for politics.

How about inventions and techonology, you know, the kind of things our great-great grandparents stood slack-jawed in wonder at a hundred years ago?

Okay, here goes, in no particular order:

• The Smartphone.
• Social Media.
• Artificial Intelligence.
• Renewable energy.
• The death of broadcast and print media.
• The completion of the Human Genome Project.
• Wikipedia.
• Skype, Zoom, etc.
• Streaming Media.
• Multimodal Biometrics.

All remarkable, sure. But none really is as dramatic as great-gramps staring in stunned silence at a biplane passing overhead, then asking, “How do they keep that thing up there?” And, to this day, none of us layfolk can adequately explain why E equals mc squared. Hell, I can’t even figure out how to superscript the 2!