Tuesday, March 25, 2003 5:54:45 PM

When you wish upon a star....

Just by way of clarity and the shock of the real, Collodi had Pinocchio beat the talking cricket with a hammer into a wet cricket paste all over the hard stone wall for giving the kid sage advice while Geppetto was in jail. Jiminy as guardian angel was of American making. Gets you to thinking doesn't it? Well, it does me.

For reasons that I will leave in the dark, I have been pondering two events in the making of American consciousness. The White City of the Chicago World Fair of 1893 and the wonder of the World of Tomorrow at New York City World's Fair 1939. That future that we all now inhabit.

First I can tell you the Columbian Exposition of 1893 - 400 (Yes, my dear, math wiz, they did miss the date by a year) years after Columbus beat his way against the stormy Atlantic and stopped at some beach front that he thought was the orient and generally brought European Civilization to America, (A lot is made of this fact both revisionist and traditionalist, but it doesn't much interest me) - was built on the cusp of America becoming an industrial behemoth. A Wonder of the White City was the electric lights that lit the place. Who cares that Tom Edison and George Westinghouse were combatants on the battleground of power delivered. Tom, ever inventive and staunchly DC, led his side of the debate by juicing and reducing an elephant with a grand jolt of AC. It was all in that grand new tradition of American robber baron industrial fun. I wished that Tesla (the very dark horse) would have won, spotting towers of wireless power dotting the rural landscape. The White City represented the burgeoning greatness of America. It was a glimpse of a forceful now.

Then I can tell you that 1939 was a year deep into a desperate economic depression (as was the world of 1893) and was the charming beginning to World War Two. Hitler on a Blitz, The Spanish Republican Army was toppling to Franco. No real reason for the optimism that the World's Fair Radiated. And radiate it did to imagine what the world of 1960 would be like (The Disney Tomorrowland of 1955 was meant to represent the world of 1986, even the man who resurrected Jiminy Cricket failed the future.) Trylon and Perisphere, Futurama, the fair was a monument to optimism. The world would have a marvel of television. Look at the mediocre field of play that bit of technology plows. Dreams of safe super highways, gliding streamlined beauties, buildings to challenge Valhalla. A lot of it came true.

I wonder what happened to the optimism.

As a kid (some say that I never really emerged from the gel into a full blown adult, and I believe they have a point, just not the one they think they are making) I spent a lot of my time of the rear porch, on the front porch, in the classroom, on the bus reading science fiction. The writing was untrained, childlike, disparaged and disparaging, fit me like a warm glove on a cold day. And it was full of optimism. That same hopefulness manifest by the World of Tomorrow in 1939.

Walk down the aisles and aisles of fantasy and science fiction books of the modern bookseller. They are full of books, read by millions (spawned by midocre movies, tawdry television and worse yet games!) and they are scarcely hopeful and I find them helpless. I pick my way among the reprinted editions and read Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and Dick and Finney and Bradbury and Williamson and Smith and a score others possibly only familiar to me. I know that this sounds like the railings of a person who has not been paying attention, but I also assure you that it is not quite that.

See, I figure that sometime in the mid sixties maybe into the seventies we all stepped into the future and immediately lost the dreams that propelled us. Disney closed tomorrow land and remodeled. It scarcely mattered. Too late. Information comes to us in an awful torrent. Wonder is a scarce commodity. I long for and come at times upon gleeful pieces of that which is great. That make life worth living. Some things abide.

...your dreams come true.