Babalu Blog

Back to the Herald's Future - Some Background

So for the last few days I've been posting sections of a long article that appeared in the Herald's Tropic magazine almost exactly 20 years ago. That article was essentially a series of predictions about what would happen over the next 20 years. I have to say it's quite fun to read what the author, John Dorschner, thought would happen and compare it to what really happened. In some areas he was dead-on accurate, and in others not so much.

Well I'm taking a few days off from work and so I decided to visit the main library to look at the microfiche of the original article to look at the pictures and transcribe the footnotes of the article. It turns out the the Dorschner article was accompanied by a couple of others for this special issue of Tropic entitled "Miami 2008: A history of the next 20 years".

I specifically wanted to post this item that explained how Dorschner reached his conclusions, so here it is:

May 22, 1988
Section: TROPIC
Edition: FINAL
Page: 8

HOW THIS STORY WAS DONE
Herald Staff

One hundred years ago, in January 1888, Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward, a futuristic book that became the best seller of its era. He set the book at the end of the 20th Century, with a narrator explaining the world's history to a man who had fallen asleep 113 years before.

The book caused a sensation because it came at a tumultuous time in American history: Immigrants were flooding the big cities. Laborers were clashing in the streets with bosses' private armies as they struggled for better pay and improved working conditions. Massive trusts were monopolizing business. Society was shifting from rural to industrial. Readers were anxious about the future, and they avidly debated Bellamy's conclusions. Other authors responded with their own fictional accounts of the future.
In retrospect, Bellamy was wrong about practically everything: He didn't foresee electricity, automobiles or airplanes. He predicted a Utopian society in which capitalism had evolved into a kind of nationalistic socialism. War, crime and poverty had disappeared. Yet even with such glaring errors, academicians for decades listed his work as one of the most influential books in American history because so many people found it a useful way of assessing the future.

Today's Miami is every bit as turbulent as Bellamy's 19th Century America. We have massive immigration, racial-ethnic tension, dramatically shifting demographics and such rapid change that Miami has been dubbed the "city of the future."

But what kind of future? It is a question that provokes as much hope and anxiety today as it did in Bellamy's time.

Writer John Dorschner, who has seen many changes in his 18 years as a Miami journalist, talked to urban planners, sociologists, pollsters, psychologists, economists, other journalists and an urban geographer. He talked to Hispanics, blacks and Anglos.

Most experts hedged their bets. They talked about "maybes." They tended to speak in statistics, not images. Dorschner took their information, blended it with his own experience and hunches and tried to give a sense of narrative realism to the experts' visions.

This story went through several drafts. After each, Dorschner showed it to various colleagues and editors, testing his hypotheses, filling holes ("What about AIDS?" "What about fusion?" "How are you dealing with crime?"), and then making changes.

One problem: Miami is often dramatic, sometimes bizarre, occasionally comical. Dorschner tried to project this ambiance into the future, without allowing his account to degenerate into satire.

Throughout the following story, Dorschner tried to seek a middle ground between Bellamy's utopianism and the pessimism of Orwell's 1984. Many of his predictions, like Bellamy's, may prove wrong. One, the death of Fidel Castro at 81, deserves special mention here. There is no factor in South Florida's immediate future that arouses more emotion than the fate of Cuba after Castro is gone. Many knowledgeable observers believe Castro will be succeeded by another staunch Communist, as regularly happens in other Soviet bloc countries. But others, including many Miami Cubans, believe it's inevitable that Cuba will become a democratic and capitalistic country after Castro is gone. In any case, to predict what will happen after Castro's death would shift the emphasis of this thought experiment from Miami toward Cuba. In order to keep the focus of speculation squarely on the future of South Florida, we decided to postulate that Castro remains alive and in power to the age of 81 and allow readers to conjecture for themselves about what happens to Cuba after his death.

All the predictions in this story are first of all intended to provoke thought and comment on the present: to remind us all that what we do and fail to do today and tomorrow inevitably will lead to what happens 20 years from now. Some predictions, such as the forecast of another Liberty City riot, are distressing. But so are the trends that forced Dorschner to include that prediction in his scenario. As Ebenezer Scrooge discovered in Charles Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol, the wonderful thing about the future is that it hasn't happened yet. We can still act to change it.

So now you have the background. I will be adding the footnote text to the sections I've already posted. If you haven't read any of this series I think you'll enjoy it.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Posted by Henry Louis Gomez at March 24, 2008 02:54 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.babalublog.com/cgi-bin/mt/hut.cgi/7826

Comments

Post a comment