In the mid-seventies, how many sports fans, catching glimpses of longhaired teens flipping their skateboards in empty swimming pools, realized they were witnessing the birth of extreme athletics?  Ten years later, how many media critics observed the young man standing next to DJ Jazzy Jeff and announced, “There’s Hollywood’s next leading man”?  And as this new century dawned, how many political commentators, watching the affable son of a Texas oil tycoon assume the Oval Office, shrugged and sighed, “Well, in four years, how much damage could this guy really do?”

Time and time again, the downfall of contemporary cultural criticism proves to be its unavoidable anchoring in the present.  Commentators overestimate the unfolding legacies of the day’s celebrities, while ignoring the more substantial contributions of their undiscovered peers.  Trivial fads are mistaken for great achievements, while the truly transformative phenomena go unnoticed.

Ever dissatisfied with the status quo, Team Atrox resolved to offer their readership something better.  The recruitment process required some outside-the-box strategies, but we’ve at last managed to locate a cultural critic whose observations are freed from the limiting perspective of the present day.

Dr. Karen Ishiguro is a professor of history and cultural studies at Michael Viscardi University in Neo San Diego, as well as a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Slate Magazine, and Amber Tamblyn’s Almanac, in the year 2121.  In the present day, her columns from the future appear solely at TheAtrox.com.

21/21 Hindsight
A look back from the century ahead

1. Salutations

Hello, the Oughts!  Would that I were capable of giving you a proper period greeting, a “high-fiver” or palm-clasping “shake,” but the humble technologies of Century Twenty-Two (how advanced they must seem to your quaint eyes!) as yet prevent me from engaging my ancestors in direct physical contact.  I’ll have to content myself with shuttling my little essays to your erstwhile era, and perhaps by sneaking, when the roboguard isn’t looking, a slap of Dakota Fanning’s waxen palm in the Hall of Presidents at Madame Tussauds.

At the moment, however, a nobler task calls.  We must begin our relationship as columnist and columnee!  Now perhaps you’re wondering, with that famous intellectual inquisitiveness that would lead your age to map the human genome and invent an artificial sweetener that actually tasted like sugar (because it was made from sugar), just how exactly I’ve ended up publishing in my own past.  I wish that I could take credit for the idea, but until recently I was quite satisfied writing for the humbler journals and scholarly reviews of my own decade.

The notion of publication in a previous century might never have occurred to me, were I not fortunate enough to receive a mysterious letter a few weeks ago.  The letter, tucked neatly into a sealed, yellowed envelope, was hand-delivered to my office by a Ms. Caroline Watts.  The young woman had been caretaker to the enigmatic epistle for fifteen years, after it had been willed to her by a departed grandmother, who had in turn received the thing at the bequest of the family’s obscure progenitor, one J. Thomas Stone.  The curious heirloom had passed from generation to generation along with a peculiar instruction: that the letter be delivered to one Karen Ishiguro (me!) upon the invention of Sub-Temporal Transmitting.

I won’t bore you with the dry, technical details of STT science, largely developed at my own Michael Viscardi University.  Suffice it to say that STT allowed me to respond to the letter’s succinct, but flattering, request (composed some eleven decades ago!): “Dear Dr. Ishiguro, congratulations on your work as the most accomplished historian of your century.  As fellow important thinkers, we are pleased to offer you a unique opportunity.  Please share your perspective on our bygone decade with its actual inhabitants by authoring a column for our celebrated website, The Lair of the Dreaded Atrox.  If interested, contact us with a reply via your fabulous future technologies.  Sincerely, Team Atrox.”

How could I pass up such an extraordinary opportunity!  Doesn’t every historian secretly long to tell the subjects of her study just exactly what she thinks about them?

When I announced in a faculty newsletter my intention to embark upon the project, some of my colleagues were rather shocked.  A sociology professor with whom I regularly lunch asked pointedly, “Karen, don’t you worry that revealing details of their future to citizens of the past could irreparably alter the timestream, possibly culminating in the destruction of our own present?” 

What a stick-in-the-mud!  “Karl, you can’t alter a past that’s already occurred!” I chided, gently reminding him of Deng Xiu’s volumes of Jigsaw Theory scholarship.  Furthermore, even if it were possible to change the past, could I actually exercise that much influence from a website so obscure that the only reference I could find to it was a one-line footnote under the Emory Herbertson entry in Notorious 21st Century Sex Offenders and Their Hobbies?

In any case, let the physicists worry about the ethical and practical consequences of idly toying with time travel.  My “bag” (to employ the parlance of your day) is culture, specifically yours, and that’s just what I plan on discussing in the weeks and months to come.  So “clasp shut your buckles” and “attend to your luggage,” because it’s going to be a toady ride!