FUTURES
RESEARCH
9046 - THE TOURIST - 1998
So what's a lonely old bugger like me doing out here? I'm not exactly going to start a new life am I? No, I'm going to end an old one! Don't look shocked. You haven't lived as long as me - far too long - and seen the things I have.
I wasn't always as decrepit as this, and my mind once had a razor-sharp edge to it. I was an academic, a real one - unlike so many of those who now pretend to be. Indeed, I was one of the leaders in my field; albeit that I chose to locate myself in an obscure smoke-stack institution; one of those which is so terribly unfashionable these days. It was not so leading edge as the many open universities which have sprung up to teach you as your lounge in front of your vidwall. It was definitely not as respectable as those Ivy-leaguers, and their imitators, who take your money - in large amounts - to let you come cheek to cheek with the great and the good! But, in my day at least, it was still an intellectual forcing ground; and I did more than my fair share of that forcing.
Talking about the unfashionable, I started out as an economist. I fell in love with the way its unfailing logic had, since the time of my hero Adam Smith, solved all the business problems of the world. Regrettably, I soon found that my love was a perversion - with its practitioners engaged in ever more desperate bouts of mutual masturbation. So, always practical, I decamped - with my knowledge and my degrees, for I had not totally wasted my time but had collected trophies from a range of disciplines - and moved into the more pragmatic world of business schools.
In those far distant days, the MBA, or to give it its rather quaint full title Master of Business Administration, was all the fashion. You would be hard pressed to find any such course these days, especially out here on the new frontier; it has long since been replaced by more appropriate subjects. But then it was de rigeur, if you wanted a job in management - and everybody did. I even worked with the government of one nation which insisted that any civil-servant must have an MBA before they could be promoted; tough for them, but wonderful for academics like me! My god, those really were highly motivated students.
I guess I have been something of a rebel all my life, but fortunately, the academic world tolerated my foibles, even if it didn't reward them. In fact, it took a full quarter of a century before I was given a personal chair- and then only because the government needed my services. But I was able to indulge my fantasies as I would never have been allowed to in any other profession. Eventually, the few papers I presented at conferences came to be seen as star turns, pulling in the crowds. This was not necessarily because of their erudition, though I hope that was still there under the surface, but because people wanted to see the establishment, who by then felt duty bound to attend and sit on the front row, squirm in their seats as my intellectual darts hit home. Their dilemma, one I too found delicious to watch and even played upon, was whether to go along with me, in which case they risked being destroyed by their peers, or to attack me - in which case they faced destruction at the hands of the rest of the audience, goaded on by me! In those days I had a rapier wit and, unlike my more circumspect colleagues, used it to great effect.
But I digress, albeit rather deliciously; even now, I have a mental image of those hypocrites cringing in their seats. In any case, that image encapsulates something about my life, for so much of it was given over to destroying such pomposity in individuals, and falsity in theory. This was not an inconsiderable task. As academics we were supposed to be free spirits, explorers of the intellect. It was our job to push back the frontiers of knowledge, and to mercilessly to expose any who tried to hide from the facts. This was true in my case, especially the mercilessly exposing bit, but I was a rarity - most of my colleagues were much more concerned with furthering their careers; and discretion was the virtue they cultivated above all others.
The theory was in even worse trouble. If one conservative academic led to insufferable pomposity, a rookery of them - well it sounds like that - will produce a cliché a minute. Then they will raise the cliché into a hypothesis, and to a theory; and spend their whole lives, and their client's money, trying to prove it. What is worse, their clients and their management students - both groups desperate to enjoy the reflected glory of the educational establishment - will enshrine these theories. Fortunately, their underlings will be wise enough to ignore them, and get on with business as usual.
But, yet again, I digress, no doubt my own theories will be torn apart some day. I hope they are. I couldn't bear the thought of them being preserved in aspic in the same way. As far as I was concerned, if my babies didn't deliver, they were shot immediately.
In part, therefore, my intellectual itch was stimulated by the silly ideas of others. Nothing, well almost anything, aroused me as much as using mere common-sense to take apart the latest fad. I guess the consultants, who live by such things, hated me. I suppose it's surprising I lived so long - without some unfortunate accident shortening my life, and silencing my tongue!
All right, I have to admit it, the love of my life was finding truths, preferably for the first time. If I felt an intellectual itch, I just had to scratch it, and the feeling was wonderful. At one stage I came out with a new hypothesis - I refuse to dignify even my own ideas as theories - every year.
I simply did not know what to do when they eventually put me out to pasture, and of course they did! My leaving party was the biggest ever, almost every guest a celebrity - and, I suspect, almost every one of them celebrating the departure of a pain in their collective arses. What about my private life, I hear you ask? Of course I had one, a wife who was a faithful companion all those years, even though I must have treated her worse than I did my colleagues. And, I am told, two marvellous children. But its not enough really, is it?
So I threw myself into a new project, which nobody could take away from me. With a brand new observatory at the bottom of my garden, I went in search of the universe, and I found it. The first time I saw the Nag's Head in Orion I was entranced by the sheer beauty of it. You asked why I am here. You see I cannot go out to those wondrous clouds of stars in the far galaxies, but I can visit the Rings of Saturn. Anyway I now have nothing to hold me back, and I can become one with them. I have special dispensation for euthanasia in space. The tug will take me out in my capsule, as we pass the rings, and will gently push me on my way towards them. Of course the board wouldn't let me die that way, so before I reach them a painless injection will put me into everlasting sleep. But the rings will be the last things I see, and they will be my final resting place; yet another stray pebble orbiting the planet.
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