"I have sometimes wish'd it had been my destiny to
have been born two or three centuries hence," wrote Benjamin
Franklin at the close of his life, near 1790, "for inventions of
improvement are prolific, and beget more of their kind. The present
progress is rapid. Many of great importance, now unthought of, will
before that period be procured."
On this wintry day, the three hundredth anniversary of Ben
Franklin's Boston birth, January 17, 1706, it is dry irony to
repeat his wish, that we all could be born two or three centuries
hence to see the wonders of invention in this great land of
Franklin's greatest invention, liberty in men's souls absent idle
entails, arbitrary government, suicidal priestcraft, hereditary
piracy. It is fun to imagine that if Franklin had been born in
1806, he would have marveled by 1890 at chemistry, railroading,
telephones and the screw propeller steamship. Born in 1906, he
would have marveled by 1990 at quantum mechanics, aircraft,
spacecraft, computer technology and pharmaceuticals. Born in 2006,
he would have marveled by 2090 at a return to the beginnings, the
great invention of liberty in men's souls, this time the Republic
of the United States of America writ large, sea to sea to sea to
sea, absent the Mandarin bullies of the Forbidden City, the
hallucinatory priestcraft of Persia, the paranoid pirates of the
Kremlin, the entailed sheiks of Arabia. Or not yet, not yet.
topics:
NATO
