The time will come, though you and I will not be present to witness it, when most everything about our era is forgotten, just as we’ve forgotten most everything about the semi-distant past.
Unbelievable as it may seem, there will come a day when no one will know anything about the Super Bowl, Dr. Jonas Salk, the Spice Girls or Johnnie LeMaster.
Seems impossible, doesn’t it?
But today, if asked to identify great thinkers and royalty from long ago, we might recall Socrates, Plato, Michelangelo, Cleopatra and Henry the Eighth. Maybe Martin Luther, Julius Caesar. Beethoven. Rembrandt.
Important figures in history from 100 or 150 years ago? Henry Ford, Charles Darwin, Carrie Nation, John D. Rockefeller, Hitler and Winston Churchill?
Looking back at the 20th and 21st centuries will be fuzzy. Two hundred years after the last Ap is coded and Mendo County’s new courthouse (erected back in 2035 at a cost of $65 billion) is bulldozed and a distant generation is asked to recall the most important figures from our era, we can be sure of one person:
Elon Musk.
When the last niggling podcast has fizzled its final frenzied report on Elon Musk’s slash and burn approach to reorganizing Washington, and smirked about his multiple “wives” and his funny haircut and his alliance with DJT, and when the last Musk op-ed piece in the Ukiah Daily Journal has gone to dust, and and most everything else about him is forgotten, he will still stand as one of the most important figure between 1900 and the year 3000.
Give or take, obviously.
But just as no one can comment on Dante’s love life, nor Maria Antoinette’s favorite wine(s) or Harry Truman’s middle name, no one is going to remember, or think about or care about whether Elon Musk wore a red baseball cap when inducted into the Global Academy for Superlative Achievements.
He is the reigning genius of our time, and whoever you think is in second place will look very small in comparison. You may be in a full-time snit about Musk because he doesn’t fit into your limited stereotype of what a cool dude should be, but he’s so far beyond your petty opinions that he doesn’t even know your middle name.
He will be remembered for doing more to bring electric cars to the masses than anyone. No one has done as much to combat Climate Change, assuming people in 200 years remember the quaint concept of “Global Warming.” He will do more to bring earthlings to Mars than any agency on earth. Ever. Top that.
Elon Musk has taken the reins from the trembling hands of a sclerotic, overfed NASA that today is another swollen federal bureaucracy, hardly a forward-thinking blazing space-conquerer. He is pioneering underground transportation systems for the next wave, as New York did with subways systems still running today
When Elon Musk masterminded the recent rescue of stranded astronauts, it made clear that brilliance, hard work and determination can outperform and out-succeed our bloated space agency at a tiny fraction of the cost. Musk’s achievements, unsurprisingly, are ignored, downplayed or lied about in the news.
Can Musk reorganize the federal behemoth that strangles progress, innovation and success in favor of lifelong employment for thousands of government bloodsuckers? Can’t tell. Our progressive friends bitterly oppose his efforts and openly deride his young buccaneers slashing away at the fraud, waste, abuse and corruption that strangles innovation while setting fire to tax dollars.
(NOTE: Democrats who sneer at the “DOGE Boys” and their youth and inexperience are the same Democrats who, in 2022, praised and applauded climate science pronouncements from a 13-year old girl.)
And small-minded vandals are right now busy spraying bullets into Tesla automobiles and working to undermine Musk’s enterprises. Sigh. Maybe vandals splashed Sherwin-Williams paint on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel when Michelangelo’s back was turned. Perhaps someone stole Shakespeare manuscripts because they were upset at not being cast in his plays.
We know nothing of Paul Revere’s personal life, the political leanings of Louis Pasteur, whether Machiavelli wore plaid underwear, or if Amelia Earhart was a vegetarian. In the future no one will know of Musk’s political forays, nor his thoughts on Scientology or if he was addicted to Red Bull energy drinks.
But he will be remembered as a giant in his time, among the world’s most gifted humans since Leonardo da Vinci.
Satire, right? Tommy Wayne Kramer’s column’s are great. But today’s column annoyed me in the same way that nearly all stories about Elon Musk do. They begin with the assertion that Elon Musk is brilliant, and TWK really laid it on. Newscasters too usually start their stories about him first bowing to his intellect and then proceeding with the news of whatever horror he’s inflicting.
Money goes with intelligence in many people’s minds. But it’s possible to be a billionaire and not be brilliant. There’s at least one other example in government. Wealth itself isn’t an indication of intelligence. Elon doesn’t show genius in the way he runs his companies. He doesn’t seem to treat employees well. He certainly doesn’t show brilliance with his whack ideas about colonizing space. When he talks on TV he sounds like a moron. Like Trump, his knack for bullshit somehow allowed him to acquire enough money to insulate himself from mistakes and foolishness that sink ordinarily financed people. He’s rich enough to fuck around, with impunity.
Giving him credit for saving 2 astronauts from boredom on the space station overlooks everything about Musk’s multi-billion dollar contracts with the US government that allowed that. And Musk doubtless has real smart people actually running his companies who figure out details. Giving him credit for saving astronauts overlooks the extreme waste in the first place of using 3 billion dollars (likely much more) a year in government funds continually maintaining a very small number of people on the station up there, doing what exactly?
Musk combating climate change, really? What about his personal flights around the globe? Then there’s the size of Musk’s carbon footprint from his industries, especially the building and launching of rockets, and his feverish plans to launch many many thousands of rockets to Mars to save mankind from Earth, the only planet that actually can support and nourish us?
TWK’s fawning surprised me. Musk is the richest man in the world, but nowhere near the greatest. His ego and his money has a huge impact on society, not his staggering intellect. TWK says Musk’s influence on history will be enormous, but it’s something we and our descendants will be all the sorrier for.
And no, his red hat should never be forgotten.
I am with Brian Wood 100 percent. Elon Musk may have more dollars stuffed into his pockets, but he’s not the ‘reigning genius’ of our time, as Tom Hine proclaims. What next, Tom? A proclamation that Trump is the greatest president ever, deserving of a Nobel Prize?
Excessively lavish praise perhaps, but Musk is certainly an interesting figure currently on the world stage. I remember, from my required college economics course almost 60 years ago, that there were three primary ingredients in our present system – capital, labor, and entrepreneurial ability. Musk may not be a genius inventor, but he obviously excels in the third category, and has accumulated a lot of capital. Putting eccentric and goofy presentation aside, the basic idea behind DOGE is long overdue. Remember when the venerable “60 Minutes” used to regularly expose waste and fraud in government operations? Even locally, we have the recent example of the costly and mishandled Cubbinson affair, kicked off by a squabble between the Auditor and the DA over his questionable expenses. It’s a real thing. The problem now is a ham-handed approach to the situation that threatens to throw out a lot of babies with the bathwater. And Trump is the PT Barnum of our time, a lowbrow showman and unscrupulous real estate developer, thrust into the Presidency. That “There’s a sucker born every minute” is being amply demonstrated.
The complicit behavior of the DNC in this mess, by putting such awful candidates in front of the public, is another story.
…the basic idea behind DOGE is long overdue…
That phrase is also over-spoken and blunts the main criticism of of so-called DOGE, which is that it is a mindless bludgeon against ideological targets.
And the award for ‘Reigning Genius’ goes to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkMVb0RNptA
A DOGE Perspective:
https://youtu.be/uX7xFkYt77k?si=VjB39AK7lv11PFNs
re: Bad
NO THING coming from this Ameristration is as stultifying as the INTOLERANCE dominating the scene in the U.S., now.
It is important to recognize that Musk is attacking the most vulnerable in our society. Take education for example. The federal government pays for the extra costs of educating special needs kids because in many cases the local districts can’, and wouldn’t ,. The goal is to make even these handicapped students capable of living a productive and rewarding life. Many of them are talented in unique ways. I had one student who was paralyzed from the waste down who was absolutely brilliant. He went off to UC Berkeley on a full scholarship to study engineering. It wouldn’t have happened in Musk’s world. I read one time that the real measure of a society is how well they treat the most needy.
Another program they are likely to cut is rental assistance programs. I have two renters living in small dwellings on my property. Both are on rental assistance because they both have serious health problems that renders them unable to work. They are both elderly. One is an elderly woman who was seriously injured in a fall while working as a care giver. The other is an elderly man, retired military, who has serious health problems. If Trump and Musk have their way thousands like them will be joining the ranks of the homeless. Again, how do we treat our most needy?
Where is the big ticket items in the federal budget? I have always resented that the Pentagon got 50% of the federal budget. However, I was shocked to hear on the radio the other day that it is now up to 70%. We are talking billions here and when was the last time we won a war? The history of my lifetime has been one war after another 7,000 miles away. Our military-industrial complex has become such a powerful economic force that it is sucking up trillions of our tax dollars and some people are making a lot of money off of it. If Musk and Trump were serious about making government more efficient they would start with the Pentagon.