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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Mark Steyn
March 17, 2012 4:00 A.M.
Our lesson for today comes from George and Ira Gershwin:
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi wireless was a phony . . .
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang it in the film Shall We Dance? (1937).
Seventy-five years on, the president revived it to tap dance around his
rising gas prices and falling approval numbers. Delivering his big speech on
energy at Prince George’s Community College, he insisted the American
economy will be going gangbusters again just as soon as we start running it
on algae and windmills. He noted that, as with Wilbur and his brother, there
were those inclined to titter:
Let me tell you something. If some of these folks were around when
Columbus set sail — [Laughter] — they must have been founding members of
the Flat Earth Society. [Laughter.] They would not have believed that the
world was round. [Applause.] We’ve heard these folks in the past. They
probably would have agreed with one of the pioneers of the radio who said,
“Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.” [Laughter.] One of
Henry Ford’s advisers was quoted as saying, “The horse is here to stay but
the automobile is only a fad.” [Laughter.]
The crowd loved it. But President Algy Solyndra wasn’t done:
There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don’t believe in
the future, and don’t believe in trying to do things differently. One of
my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone,
“It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?” [Laughter.]
That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore — [laughter and applause] —
because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forwards. [Applause.] He
’s explaining why we can’t do something, instead of why we can do
something.
It fell to Nan Card of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio
to inform the website Talking Points Memo that the quotation was apocryphal.
Hayes had the first telephone in the White House, and the first typewriter,
and Edison visited him to demonstrate the phonograph.
But obviously Rutherford B. Hayes isn’t as “forward-looking” as a 21st-
century president who believes in Jimmy Carter malaise, 1970s Eurostatist
industrial policy, 1940s British health-care reforms, 1930s New Deal–sized
entitlements premised on mid-20th-century birth rates and life expectancy,
and all paid for by a budget with more zeroes than anybody’s seen since the
Weimar Republic. If that’s not a shoo-in for Mount Rushmore, I don’t know
what is.
I was interested in the rest of Obama’s yukfest of history’s biggest
idiots. Considering that he is (in the words of historian Michael Beschloss)
“the smartest guy ever to become president,” the entire passage sounded
as if it was plucked straight from one of those “Top Twenty Useful Quotes
for Forward-Looking Inspirational Speakers” websites. And whaddayaknow?
Rutherford B. Hayes, the TV flash in the pan, the horse is here to stay —
they’re all at the Wikiquote page on “Incorrect Predictions.” Fancy that!
You can also find his selected examples at the web page “Some Really
Really Bad Predictions About the Future” and a bazillion others.
Given that the ol’ Hayes telephone sidesplitter turned out to be a bust, I
wondered about the others. The line about television being a “flash in the
pan” is generally attributed to “Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio
educational broadcasts, 1948.” She was a New Zealand–born lass who while
at Oxford wrote to the newly founded BBC with some ideas on using radio in
schools. By the Seventies, the educational programming she had invented and
developed was used in 90 percent of U.K. schools, and across the British
Commonwealth from the Caribbean to Africa to the Pacific. She apparently
used the flash-in-the-pan line in a private conversation recounted some
years after her death by her fellow BBC executive, Grace Wyndham Goldie, a
lady I knew very slightly. It was in the context of why she was pessimistic
about early attempts at educational television. Mary Somerville would not
have been surprised by American Idol or Desperate Housewives, but she
thought TV’s possibilities for scholarly study were limited. If you
remember Leonard Bernstein giving live illustrated music lectures on
Beethoven on CBS in the Fifties, and you’ve lived long enough to see “
quality public television” on PBS dwindle down to dreary boomer nostalgia,
lousy Brit sitcoms, Laurence Welk reruns, and therapeutic infomercials, you
might be inclined to agree that as an educational tool TV certainly proved
“a flash in the pan.” And that’s before your grandkid gets home from
school and complains he’s had to sit through Al Gore’s An Inconvenient
Truth again.
What was Obama’s other thigh slapper? Oh, yes. “The horse is here to stay
but the automobile is only a fad.” The line is generally attributed to “
the president of the Michigan Savings Bank” in 1903. That would be George
Peck, born in 1834 on a hardscrabble farm in Connecticut. Due to a boyhood
accident, he was unable to use one arm and so was no good for agricultural
labor. So at the age of 16 he started as the lowest paid clerk in a Utica
dry-goods store. From this unpromising start, Peck built one of the largest
dry-goods businesses in Michigan. Was he, as the president said, one of
those men “who don’t believe in the future”? Not at all. He was president
of the Edison Illuminating Company, named for the guy who invented that
light bulb the United States government has banned. Henry Ford was Peck’s
chief engineer. Peck set his son and Ford up in a shop on Park Place in
Detroit to work on their prototype horseless carriages. After Ford departed,
the first porcelain spark plug was baked in Peck’s shop.
Christopher Columbus? Once upon a time, your average well-informed high-
schooler, never mind the smartest president in history, understood that
Columbus was laughed at not because everyone believed the world was round:
Educated Europeans of his day accepted that the earth was spherical and had
done since Aristotle’s time. They laughed because they thought he was
taking the long way round to the East Indies. Which he was.
So let’s see. The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th-century
Spaniards, when in fact he is the one entirely ignorant of them. A man who
has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a
dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-
grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces
electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste. Marie.
A man who sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who
brought the voices of T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, and others into the
farthest-flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama’s own dismal
speech as being too obviously reliant on “Half-a-Dozen Surefire Cheap
Cracks for Lazy Public Speakers.” A man whose own budget officials predict
the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent
predecessor for being insufficiently “forward-looking.”
A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and
purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It’s not clear why
it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle Crowd-
Pleasing for Dummies as a keynote address.
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, they all laughed at Edison . . .
How does that song continue? “They laughed at me . . . ”
At Prince George’s Community College they didn’t. But history will, and
they will laugh at us for ever taking him seriously.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America:
Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn |
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