THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

For the first time since the year it was made I watched Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. This picture of The Future was positively nostalgic. It began with a rehash of the theory in African Genesis, the part Robert Ardrey himself later disowned, about ape-men first discovering the use of an antelope's leg bone as a weapon. It shows how it was a visitor from space showed the ape-men how to pick up a bone.

Van Daniken explained how only visitors from space could have shown the Egyptians how to put stones on top of each other. But he did not explain why those spacemen didn't show the brilliant Egyptians how to use the wheel, which came into practical use there only after the pyramids were finished.

You will probably remember that, after the extraterrestrial had shown the ape-man the magic of picking up a stick and the ape-man had triumphed, it threw the bone into the air and it became a space rocket. In this rocket, a stewardess in a tiny stewardess cap and a very short dress was delivering a drink down the aisle to the single passenger. The point of this scene was to show that in this futuristic world, which came directly from the pick up a stick inspiration from Outer Space, space travel of this would be as routine as short air flights were when the movie was made.

Those who made the movie did not realize that part of the NEW inevitable Future would Women's Lib: No sexist short skirts.

Cut to the orbiting space station. Once again, it was shown to be routine. The man wanted to make a call back to Earth, so he went to public phone booth. As you know, even the youngest of you will have to explain to your children what a public phone booth was.

Arthur Clark did not make the movie. But what is particularly ironic about this is it was Arthur C. Clarke HIMSELF who actually made the pubic phone booth an anachronism, especially for long distances like phoning to earth. About 1947 he wrote a science fiction story that described how future communications would be bounced off a system of orbiting satellites.

Nothing is more dated than the Future. I keep pointing out that Futurology has nothing to do with the future. This is important to BUGS because the future is our business. In fact, we are about the only people who have a serious interest in what the future will REALLY be like. When the movie 2001 was made, those who made it were interested in showing that they were Up On The Latest Thing, Ardrey's African Genesis, routine transoceanic air travel, and the routine of calling earth from a public phone.

This is the only place on earth where you will see someone point out these flaws in 1960s futurology. Why? Because it only matters to us. No one else is interested in real futurology. We have an obsession that makes no sense to anybody else. We are actually interested the survival of our race.

My discussion of the first ten minutes of the movie 2001 is naive to most people. Everybody knows that the film makers did not make the movie to predict the future. They made it "to appeal to the demographic." 2001 was a terrific box office success because it showed the film makers were in touch with The Latest Thing.

The Latest Thing in 1968.

The Latest Thing in the mind of THE demographic, movie goers of the Sterile Sixties, young upwardly mobile people of a generation that, in our scale of values, committed suicide genetically.

2001 did exactly what it was supposed to do. Those who made it succeeded. As an economist would say, they maximized their utility from it. That means that they derived the maximum of pleasure from the fact that the movie was successful. Not only successful, but a hit with the YUPPIES of their day.

They're dead now. ECONOMIC utility ends when your heart stops beating.

In the BUGS scale of values, what matters is the REAL future. But that is OUR scale of values, the BUGS scale of values. I have gotten used to the fact that, in utility terms, my obsession with the REAL future makes no sense.

Everything here interrelates. Our enemies are correct in pointing out that our monomaniacal concern for the REAL future is not RATI0NAL in pure personal cost-benefit terms.

I keep saying that, "They can have the money. They can have the fame. They can have the profits. They can be the ones who are 'with it' and 'cool.'

I just want to rule the world after they are forgotten.