journal features

a new road aflame

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2003.10.21

This morning while eating breakfast, I noticed a column of smoke rising into the air half a block north of my apartment building. I got up to have a look and saw that the road (Davisville Rd) was on fire! A crew laying down new asphalt had had some kind of problem, and the whole thing was alight. They didn't seem too traumatized by it, and quickly got the fire out, but it seems like a strange way of resurfacing a street.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)