Upward, Not Forward, And Always Whirling…

John Edwards wants to build a bridge to the 24th and a half century (or something like that), but he would never use the phrase “building a bridge,” because it would involve nostalgic reminiscences of years gone by.  You have to enjoy how he lumps together the “policies of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s,” which he is not going to follow, as if the policies from all three decades formed a coherent unit. 

That reminds of something Sir Humphrey once said:

Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel, and of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I’d have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I would have been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac, but above all, I would have been a stark staring raving schizophrenic!

On a more serious note, people who invoke the future are dangerous, because the future “authorizes every kind of humbug.”