journal features

after the storm

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2005.08.26

Once again, the air is at its clearest following a typhoon. There is some lingering low cloud that prevents me from seeing Fuji this morning, but I can see the city well, right out to the mountain ranges in the west. One thing I've noticed is that the city is dotted with stacks that seem to be from incinerators. I can only assume that these are from hospitals. From my vantage point at this desk, I can see seven. And that's just one 30-degree vista from the western end of the city - this place really is incredibly vast.

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)