My Musings
When the godforsaken un-American virus that everyone is all up in arms about is finally conquered by American ingenuity (or just disappears), it will be time to invite back to our hallowed halls the great thinkers and talkers of our time. And even people who just babble endlessly. Anyone who’s willing to get into an airplane and stand up before a live audience of eager listeners would suffice. We need them to come to our conferences and take questions at our seminars; we need them to give keynote addresses.
In my case, I’m going to invite them to “events” and not even require them to speak. I’ll find leading thinkers and tell them about my organization, ask if they’d mind saying a few words. But once they arrive they’ll find that they’ve been invited to a social gathering, not a conference, and that I haven’t provided a stage or any kind of infrastructure for them use in peddling their messages. Tipsy friends of mine will greet my guest speaker warmly, freaking her out. “When am I called upon to speak?” she wonders.
Never. You’ve been invited to a party. And here comes the band!
In the future, bands will be allowed to yell into microphones again, scaring the hell out of everyone just like they have done for decades. That’s how much the future is going to look like the past. Not the recent past, which has been a real drag in case you didn’t notice, but the pre-2020 past, which admittedly wasn’t great between, like, November 3rd 2016 right up until things somehow got worse this calendar year.
And we’ll have keynote speakers again, I’m pretty sure. Can’t wait to sip glasses of cheap red wine whilst listening to the intellectual jibba-jabba.