Signs & Wonders

Rather than the usual photo of my mug accompanying this column, let me offer something infinitely more entertaining -- a highway sign on Interstate 80 in western New Jersey. With no other indication of what travelers might find by following the sign, it's evoked for me a surreal image of an industrial park that manufactures the Dreams that Stuffs are made of. Now, that's progress.

The folksinger John Prine has a ditty in which he cheerily sings: "We are living in the future/ask me how I know/I read it in a newspaper/fifteen years ago." The consumer literature of this last century holds a vast trove of wonderment that was to be the fate of the human race by the close of the 20^th Century. Certainly you know that each of us would be commuting in our personal autogyros and rocketpacks by now. Then there are the atomic-powered cars, personal household robots and brain-wave communication systems.

Earlier in this century and on the heels of patents commissioner Charles H. Duell's famous declaration, "Everything that can be invented has been invented," we held immense faith in the infinite power of Science to Save the Human Race, just as kids expected that the X-ray specs they busted their piggy bank for would let them peer right through anything. But the scientists have turned out to be a disappointment, in part due to the influence of science-gone-awry movies and in part the real-life accidents that make the news -- the events at Japan's nuclear power plant, for a recent example. So we turn to the Design Engineers, who are an order of magnitude closer to consumers than Scientists but still exist in a fantastic realm of ergonomics, exotic man-made materials and seemingly unfathomable technologies. This would explain how a consumer would buy an SUV that gulps fuel at a rate unimproved since new 1965 Chrysler Imperials roamed the earth. We trust the design, because it's available to the consumer -- it wouldn't be designed to be sold unless it was OK for us to consume, would it? So we are left again with Michael Rennie, standing on the rim of that spaceship in 1951, warning the people of Earth to stop their nuclear frenzy or else the robots of Klaatu's planet would reduce the world to a burnt-out cinder. "The decision," declares Klaatu, "is up to you."

Coincidentally, the off-ramp where this sign stands also leads travelers to a community named Hope. Really.

rmandel@mail.aip.com