Popular Culture Review
after a bloody nine-year war there had taken countless lives. Luckily,
Afghanistan went on to become a place of peace right after that. On May
27, 1988, Microsoft released Windows 2—“the only operating system
you’ll ever need.” Luckily, we all still use Windows 2, and it continues
to run like a dream. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen
was called before the Senate. He testified that man-made global warming
had begun and was measurable. He used the phrase “climate change” and
warned that drastic measures had to be taken and changes needed to be
implemented immediately in order to protect the planet. Luckily,
everyone listened and today the planet is fixed. On October 30, 1988,
Philip Morris bought Kraft Foods for $13.1 billion dollars in one of the
largest—and strangest—corporate takeovers in history. But luckily, all of
the multinational corporations after that decided to play nicely once they
got together, and capitalism has worked ever since to lower prices,
spread the wealth, create good living conditions for all, and generate a
healthy middle class in the United States.
Indeed, it would be too easy to go through the calendar year and
find such examples of “the more things change, the more they stay the
same.” But we need to be realistic in our analysis, not cynical. And
realistically, the relationship between change and permanence is a
complicated one with a eomplicated theoretical ontology at work. So let
us begin here; in order for something to change, there must be a
permanent background or a permanent context behind it such that the
change can even be recognized or manifest itself In other words, without
something not changing, change itself could never appear. And there is
thus, at best, a dialectical relationship at work.
To see why this is so, consider the following thought experiment.
What if you were suddenly to grow ten times larger than you are right
now? Obviously, you and everyone around you would definitely notice
this and be able to measure it. You would smash through the ceiling of
the room in which you are sitting, looming over it—and everything
else—like a giant. Now imagine instead that you grew ten times larger,
but at the exact same instant, so did everything else in the imiverse. That
is, the entire cosmos, everywhere, started growing at the same rate and
eventually ended up ten times larger than when it all began. You, me,
tables and chairs, planets and stars and space itself. Imagine everything
were to start increasing in size at the same rate. The interesting point is,
of course, that we would never notice it. We wouldn’t notice it while it
was happening, and we wouldn’t notice it when it was done. In fact, we
more or less can’t be sure that this isn’t happening right now in reality