Edison and Ford
I just took a walk through Blog Park, and any who read my very first entry will know what that means.
For me, it is the place which is closest to the interface between this world, that is the physical location in space and time where we find ourselves, with the trams passing by on the street and the dirty snow bordering sidewalks with patches of ice, and the world which exists outside us all and inside my own mind, the noosphere is the actual word for it, the world of ideas, that accumulation of art and literature and science which has been excreted from the body of humanity over the thousands of generations of our existence.
In short, it’s where I go to get high and let my mind wander.
Today, for some reason, I started thinking about Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and the relationship of an individual human being to immortality. I hope my poems are read 100 or 1,000 years from now, just as people still switch on Edison’s electric lights and undoubtedly still will, or something even more amazing, and if people are no longer driving cars in 1,000 years, as I fervently hope, Ford’s innovations in manufacturing and labor relations have shaped our society in many ways.
But they each had a dark side. Edison was a ruthless businessman and a thief of ideas. Ford was a Nazi. Not actually convicted, but definitely sympathetic to their cause way beyond an acceptable historical cutoff point. (which makes him no worse than Joseph Kennedy, Sr. or Prescott Bush, but I digress)
Part of the accolades which history has assigned to Edison rightfully belong to Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse and Joseph Swan.
Does it matter? Everyone involved is now well beyond dead, so unless there is some kind of actual afterlife (which I can’t accept on anywhere near as literal a level as most in our society) it doesn’t matter to them, who gets the credit.
Still, I wrote a little movie in my head, with Edison and Ford (who were close friends) as bad guys, and a host of minor characters, all interesting in their own right, battling against them in short vignettes, in the style of Love, Actually.
And that’s what I was thinking as I walked through the park today.
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