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Found this unused essay while I was rummaging:
Considering all the monstrous crap that's gone down since, the Concorde crash seems almost like either a blip by comparison, or a harbinger of the weird world to come. I notice that hardly anyone even bothered to make note of the anniversary. "Three years ago? But, but, that was the Before Times!" The Talking Heads have so much invested in pretending that Things Have Always Been Like This that having any kind of memory can make you crazy these days.
I'm weirdly upset about the crash of the Concorde.
It's not as if I would ever have had a chance to fly on it -- not in my socioeconomic bracket, which can most kindly be described as "not even worth Bill Gates' time to laugh at". But somehow, I find the image of that bright shining bird screaming down from the sky on a phoenixlike gout of fire fully as ominous and disturbing as the memory, still raw after fourteen years, of a proud gravity-defying column of smoke trailing off into two confused squiggles.
There's a commercial right now, I can't recall what for, where the actor Avery Brooks rants, angry and puzzled, that it's the year 2000, so where are the flying cars? A lot of promises were made in the middle years of the last century: the two-hour workday, the end of disease and hunger, and, yes, the shiny happy Jetsons world where everyone had their own robot and flying car. Supersonic travel was one of these promises; in "the Future", it would be as easy to hop from New York to Paris as it would be to run to the corner drugstore for some plutonium.
But now yet another Future lies broken and burning in a field near Paris, revealing in its firey wake the many unspoken doubts about the promises it represented. "It was always a pipe dream", the talking heads now say; too expensive, too impractical, too... too much yesterday's idea of what we ought to have become by now, an embarrasing reminder of how far we've failed to come. The aging fleet of Concordes had already been scheduled to be phased out within the decade, some years earlier than its originally projected useful lifespan; despite occasional spasms of scientific speculation, nothing has come along since to take its place.
What have we lost, with the death of this one impractical rich-people's toy? Perhaps nothing more than a hundred-odd lives, and after a suitable period of mourning (and a few impatient temper-tantrums over disrupted schedules) life will resume as it was for the world at large. But I think perhaps we've lost something more today. One by one, the dreams of the past have become today's tired and cynical nightmares; if the Concorde has taken its last flight, yesterday's future is again made one bit more bleak.
July 25th, by strange coincidence, is the anniversary of the sinking of the "Andrea Doria" -- another transportation disaster that effectively spelled the end of a whole mode of travel. Will coming generations look back on this day in the year 2000 as the day another "Hindenburg" took its whole race down in flames? Or will some elusive "something better" come along to make this crash a quaint footnote to the glorious march of human progress? Recently change has been moving at such a dizzying rate that predicting the future, a popular hobby fifty years ago if the films they've left us are any indication, has become so impossible as to be almost an impediment to imagining it at all. Will another beautiful swift bird arise from the Concorde's ashes? Or have we, from bitter experience, been broken ourselves?
Considering all the monstrous crap that's gone down since, the Concorde crash seems almost like either a blip by comparison, or a harbinger of the weird world to come. I notice that hardly anyone even bothered to make note of the anniversary. "Three years ago? But, but, that was the Before Times!" The Talking Heads have so much invested in pretending that Things Have Always Been Like This that having any kind of memory can make you crazy these days.