But he failed to foresee our shortcomings. Presumably he did not actually believe the next hundred years would be free of wars and population growth, but he had no way of knowing, for example, that TV would arrive, filling our days with its nonsense. Then the internet. How mass psychological manipulation by the advertising industry would amp up the consumerist side of our natures, causing us to care so much more and so vapidly about what other people have. The rampant increase in per capita consumption. The endless distractions of modern life. The rise of the military-industrial complex and how it would soak up our surpluses in the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction. Of weapons of any size of destruction. He did not foresee the “Great Acceleration,” which only really got going after he died. The explosive expansion not just of technology but of all kinds of Earth-altering activities, how capitalism would reshape the planet, the environmental and social and economic costs that climate catastrophe would impose unequally but without exception around the world. The down-the-road consequences of endless growth. How the income inequality caused by globalization would render traditional political structures increasingly susceptible to the very sort of authoritarian takeover bids that keep popping up these days. Attacks on democracy! Two whole years, now, of that hideous man and his ghoulish cronies. Two years of terrifying obviousness, of conspiracy theories and white nationalists, climate denial, double down, hashtag, “Lock her up!,” sad. That voice. That voice. That vacuum of leadership. I wouldn’t have imagined it two and a half years ago, let alone in 1930. It was one of those impossible possibilities, the kind that movies have convinced us can’t happen. America asleep at the wheel, no one to witness and adjust, now I’m letting poetry into this. No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car. Which is the last line, actually. The poem starts: The pure products of America go crazy. In between, the poet talks about his maid. William Carlos Williams, high school English. The first adult poem I ever understood. The car is America and there’s nobody to drive it.