Predictions/Futurism

With that provocative question mark in the title and the enticing subtitle, “Memories of the Future–Unsolved Mysteries of the Past,” Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? became a huge success in the English-speaking world, following its translation from the German of its original 1968 publication.  ”Was God an Astronaut?” the American version’s dust-jacket asks:  ”All over the world there are ruins and improbable objects which cannot be explained by conventional theories of archeology or religion.  But supposing you look at them in the light of today’s knowledge about space travel.  A remarkable consistency emerges.  They suggest the appearance of beings from other planets in prehistoric times and pose the question–Was God an Astronaut?”

Von Däniken, identified only as a “famous Swiss author,” was just 33 when the book was published.  ”It took courage to write this book,” he tells us in the book’s first line, “and it will take courage to read it.”  ”Scholars will call it nonsense,” he correctly predicts about a book that claims to reveal that the “past teemed with unknown gods who visited the primeval earth in manned spaceships” and that these “’strangers’ annihilated part of mankind existing at the time and produced a new, perhaps the first, homo sapiens.”   Von Däniken sees evidence of visitations from prehistoric astronauts in cave paintings showing “the extraordinary obsession primitive man had with figures on suits and unusual headgear,” and in Incan and Aztec ruins and landscape formations.

Von Däniken’s theories became even more widely known in the 1970s with the TV “documentary,” In Search of Ancient Astronauts. Later eruptions of Von Dänikenism came with the TV series Battlestar Galactica and Stargate.  In fact, the Chariots of the Gods phenomenon, although clearly a product of 1960s gullibility, apocalypticism, and fascination with all things “scientific” and astronautical, has never really gone away, and may in fact be even stronger today.  One has only to turn to that bellwether of nutty popular credulity, the History Channel, for proof.  The cable channel (which owns the domain name “history.com”), once dubbed the “Hitler Channel” for its devotion to WWII documentaries, has lately turned increasingly to content based on conspiracy theories, mythology, pseudo-science, extraterrestrials, and mythical monsters like Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster.   In March 2009, it first aired a program called Ancient Aliens (it’s being shown again tomorrow night, November 29).  Its promotional materials claim that “millions of people accept the theory that intelligent life forms visited Earth thousands of years ago and were worshiped as gods by primitive man. Are monuments like Stonehenge and Easter Island the last remains of an ancient alien visitation?”

As the final frames of the famous 1958 movie The Blob once asked:  “The End?”

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I bought this November 1968 Playboy, yes, to read the articles.

Instant electronic democracy?

The cover art reminds us that 1968 was an election year, and since this issue would have appeared on the newstands in October, I thought it would probably have something in it about the hotly contested presidential race.  Although this issue contains few references to the candidates or the race, it does feature

a fascinating article by Washington Post reporter Robert Sherrill speculating on a subject that had gained some currency: the coming era of “instant electronic democracy,” by which the electorate will communicate its demands directly to Congress by “a push-button tie-up with Washington.”    Sherrill uses such predictions as a way of writing critically about Congress, but in the end he concludes that the “instant electorate” would ultimately be disastrous for democracy.

Coming soon: unearthly hedonism

Futuristic (and sometimes apocalyptic) dreaming was popular during 1968.   Here, rocket engineer Krafft Ehricke (one of the group of Third Reich scientists and technicians “imported” to the U.S. in 1945) giddily describes plans for “Astropolis–a pleasure paradise in orbit above the earth,” with hotels, casinos, theaters, ballrooms, a shopping center–not to mention farms and factories for growing all the food and manufacturing all the water and air needed by guests and staff.    ”Science fiction?  Hardly.”  This first space resort is a “completely attainable extension of the science fact of 1968,” and a “frontier of unearthly hedonism.”  Ehricke projects it to be ready by 1999.

More news from the future, this time about pills (again)

Another somewhat futuristic article (which also connects with a previous post on Covering 1968:  http://tinyurl.com/yazrdat) takes up “Pyschochemistry: Personality by Prescription.” Ernest Havemann, a journalist and psychologist, writes:

“There are respected researchers on record as believing that man will soon have drugs that will cure his major mental disturbances, eliminate his fears and anxieties, keep him fat or lean at will, let him decide for himself how long, if at all, he cares to sleep, make him much smarter than ever before and even permit him to live longer.  You name it, and there is somebody–not a wild-eyed visionary but a sane and skeptical scientist–who believes it is just around the corner.”

Entertainment for Men

Of course, as much as PLAYBOY was a source for serious writing on politics and contemporary popular science, it was– it’s right there on the cover–”Entertainment for Men.”   There’s the famous “Playboy Advisor feature,” with advice about sex, etiquette, and hipness; “Playboy’s Party Jokes,” a column of not very humorous humor; and lots of cartoons, most of them about–you guessed it–sex.

But “Entertainment for Men” mostly meant lots of pictures of naked women–and not just in the famous centerfold.  This issue features an article on “Theater of the Nude,” with photos from New York productions of Hair, Tom O’Horgan’s Futz! and Tom Paine, all of them featuring nude actors.   ”The theater, in case you haven’t noticed, has stripped for action.  The nude revolution is underway. . . and it comes just when the theater seemed to dead, killed by its own stuffiness.  But at least–and at last–it’s here.  The taboos about bare breasts, bare buttocks and even exposed genitals have been broken.”

This may– or may not– be the only issue of Playboy in which the centerfold article about the Playmate of the Month begins by quoting Henry David Thoreau: “All good things are wild and free,” which, the editors say, is the “perfect capsule summary” of this playmate’s outlook on the world.  Paige Young leads an “untrammeled life style as a free-lance artist.”  ”‘Painting for a living is a struggle,’” she is quoted as saying.  Her studio is in Malibu, but she is not a “fan of the far-out fads and plastic pleasures of California.”  For the record, she’s also enjoys scuba diving and singing folk songs.

Finally, there is a full-page advertisement for one of 1968’s most outrageous and notorious movies:  Barbarella, the futuristic “romp” featuring Jane Fonda in “bizarre sex-ploits.”  Barbarella deserves a closer look– coming soon to Covering 1968.

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1968: THE END IS NEAR

The opening this coming weekend of the world-ending apocalypse movie 2012 makes me wonder–what did Apocalypse look like in 1968?  There were many people–”many” may be a gross underestimate–in 1968 who thought that the year was full of evidence that the End Was Near.  I ran across this advertisement for . . .  for what?  On its surface, it’s an ad for The Plain Truth magazine, and a book, The Wonderful World Tomorrow, which was also the name of the radio show featuring evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong.

Born again– in 1968?

“Garner Ted”:  That great combination of names– so redolent of all radio evangelists, of Southern good-ole-boys–has stuck with me all these years, though I didn’t really remember who he was until I started this research.  (Unlikely that I would have remembered him from his appearances on Hee-Haw, the country-music knockoff of Laugh-In.)  Garner Ted’s brand of evangelism calls to mind the “Born Again” movement, and evangelists Jerry Falwell, Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker– in other words, something more associated with the 1970s, rather than the Sixties. But–here he is, Garner Ted,  in full cry in 1968, in a full-page, full-color ad in LIFE magazine, of all places, not something marginal and weird.  And he and his ministry (at the moment in partnership with his father, the even better-known Herbert W. Armstrong, a partnership that would go off the rails in just a few years) are seizing on the day’s headlines to offer proof positive of the coming of the end times. Here are the opening salvos of the ad:

“It was never like this before”

“All of a sudden what’s happened? It was never like this before.

“Unsafe to walk on streets–in city or in town!  Your house may be broken into if you’re away! Crime rampant, even in residence areas!

“Student revolt in 20 countries–violence on campuses.  Disheveled hippies lolling about aimlessly.

“Unhappy marriages–increasing divorce– juvenile delinquency!  WHY this sudden breaking down of family life?

“Racial strife, mass demonstrations, riots, looting, VIOLENCE!  And threat of nuclear war!”

. . . “Many scientists are frightened!  They and even military leaders are now using such phrases such as ‘Armageddon’–and ‘the end of the world.’  Humanity’s BIG problem, now, is SURVIVAL!”

Here’s a subject that’s ripe for investigation:  the roots of 1970s charismatic Christianity, “televangelism,” and the “born-again” movement in the Cold-War anxieties and social turmoil of the 1960s, especially the upheavals that came in 1968.   “Covering 1968″ would be happy to hear any thoughts about this– the sooner the bettter.  Time is running out.

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“Life may turn out to be worth living after all.”

In the July 1968 issue of Esquire (the one with the cover shot of black men “staying cool” in an ice warehouse–see this blog’s first post), the editors ran a full-page ad promoting its upcoming Anniversary Issue.  Instead of touting the roster of star writers who would be appearing, the ad is a simple, striking black page, with a couple of blocks of type.  Here’s the headline, blocked in yellow:  ”If you can muddle through the next three months, America, we’ll save you in October.”  And it’s followed by this list:  ”Your cities are crumbling.  The masses are in revolt.  The economy is shaky.  Your children are unwashed and living in sin.”  The ad goes on to say that Esquire would be publishing a special issue on the theme, “Salvaging the Twentieth Century.”  ”Stick around,” the editors advise: “Life may turn out to be worth living after all.  (Consider the alternative.)”

Of course, the ad is not entirely serious.  It’s arch and hip in that jaded-sophisticate way so dear to Esquire readers.  But beneath the ad’s somewhat bemused tone is a sense of bleakness and fatigue that seems altogether appropriate in the waning months of 1968.

Martin, Robert, and John

And when October 1968 finally did roll around, the artwork chosen by George Lois and Carl Fischer for the cover of this 35th Anniversary Issue was anything but droll:  the two martyred Kennedy brothers joined by Martin Luther King, standing in the midst of endless rows of uncarved white stone gravestones, suggesting the immense and mounting body count of the 20th century’s latest war.  It’s sobering to remember that in October 1968, JFK had been dead less than five years; he would have been just 51 that year.  RFK and MLK had been dead for just a few months.  This triumvirate of loss would be joined together in countless other renditions–in black velvet, on commemorative plates–but probably never so powerfully as here.

Pulling out the stops

Inside the issue, Esquire pulled out all the stops, as you might imagine.  There are contributions by a extraordinary spectrum of observors: from F. Scott Fitzgerald (a never-before-published essay called “My Generation”), William Styron, Frank Conroy, Truman Capote (on capital punishment); Gore Vidal, Daniel Boorstin, and William F. Buckley, with smaller contributions from Billy Graham, Stokely Carmichael, Moshe Dayan, Barry Goldwater, and Mickey Rooney, not to mention Popeye, Pogo, and L’il Abner and Daisy Mae.   We’ll get to some of those in future “Covering 1968″ posts.   Stick around.

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A Journal of the Future from 1968

Criswell Predicts from Now to the Year 2000– “now” being 1968, when it was published– was billed on the dust jacket as “Criswell’s ‘Journal of the Future,’ his only book of prophecy.” Criswell — a.k.a. “The Amazing Criswell”– was born Jeron Criswell Konig in Indiana, and with his wavy, stark white hair and piercing light-colored eyes, he visually fit the bill of a seer.  In fact, the disembodied photo on the cover of this book resembles nothing more than Frank Morgan as “Oz, the Great and Powerful” at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Most people in 1968, I imagine, thought of Criswell as every bit the charlatan that the Wizard was.  But there must have also been a sizable number of believers, readers of his syndicated newspaper column and buyers of his books.  He did not, mercifully, start up his own church, though that, too, would not have been surprising in his adopted land of Southern California.  He was more glamorous and Hollywood than the dowdy (and hence more “serious”) Jeane Dixon, whose predictions showed up frequently in the tabloids, and who was later taken somewhat more seriously by Richard Nixon and Nancy Reagan.  Dixon’s bestselling 1965 biography made her all the rage, though Criswell was already making headlines by appearing on Jack Paar’s show and later with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show.

Predictions as social commentary

Criswell, nutty though he was, did represent, it seems, a strain of apocalypticism that ran through the “revolutionary” 1960s.  Like all “futuristic” pronouncements throughout time, his predictions tell us a lot about his times and the era’s anxieties.  Take the very first prediction in the book:  ”Homosexual cities:  I predict that perversion will flood the land beginning in 1970,” in a series of “small, compact, carefully planned areas.”  The Supreme Court “will rule that whatever these consenting adult males, or females, wish to do, they can!”  Criswell seems somewhat fixated on nudity and sex, predicting variously that nudism will be legalized and become widespread, and that “our own United States will in the future be swept by the popular clouds of an Aphrodesian fragrance” that will lead to “frenzied sex orgies.”   Turning to racial unrest, he predicts that the riots of the 1966 and 1967 “will not abate for the next five years,” but that a “powerful Negro leader named Sanders” will appear in 1972.  Sanders will urge “migration of all American Negroes to Mississippi,” which will become the most progressive state in America.   Criswell predicts the assassination of Castro (1970), the replacement of cash with credit “punch cards;” the birth of septuplets in Iowa in 1973; the marketing of home face-lift kits ($5.00); renewed war in Korea (1969); the disappearance of newspapers (”as we know them today”); and the invention of male birth control pills (1971).  San Francisco is wiped out by earthquake (kind of a no-brainer, but he pegs it for 1975); Denver is destroyed by a weird space ray (1989); and London is obliterated by a meteor (1988).  Criswell’s final prediction?  Yes, it’s the Big One:  ”The world as we know it will cease to exist . . . on April 18, 1999.” Though not overtly religious, Criswell still sees God as the Author of all of this:  ”Oh my friend, we dare not doubt the honesty of God! For at the end of Time, God will give his final command! ‘Let there be Darkness!’”

Does anyone else besides me remember this guy from the Carson show?

Any ideas for other 1960s predictions, apocalyptic or otherwise?

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